Struggling to make your communications crystal clear? Check out the plain language principals. http://ow.ly/5putN
The new Success in the City website is LIVE! Andrea had a blast writing this one. :) http://ping.fm/sPnwc
RubyNation: Closing Keynote: Dr. Nic Williams
RailsInstaller. Why was it built? When Rails 3 came out the documentation told Windows users to install InstantRails. But…. InstantRails installed ruby 1.8.6….. yet Rails 3 only works with ruby 1.8.7 or ruby 1.9.2. WTF?! Why didn’t anyone catch this?
“I wasn’t wrong; it just wasn’t the best example.”
“A healthy community involves someone that has more expertise turning around and pulling someone else forward.”
“Why do we care? We love ruby. We’re happy. We don’t like to think about suffering in the world. But we should reflect on that a bit. There are a lot of people in the world that are suffering. Think about it, right now, somewhere in the world, there’s someone that’s coding in Java. Well, to be honest, they’re either defining a variable or writing a comment, but they’re out there.” [There’s a bit of paraphrasing here, because Nic talks faster than I type, but that should be pretty close.]
We have to turn
- Awareness into Advocacy
- Novices into Exports
- Users into Core Contributors
A healthy community is huge, diverse, growing community.
The ruby and rails community, at the moment, is not doing a very good job with diversity, whether it’s gender, race or platform diversity.
Create your own club that talks about the thing that you are interested in.
“Wouldn’t you like to know how they did it? Well, yes you would, because I’ve got the microphone, and I’m going to tell you anyway.”
How to create a club? - Do this from the ground up
- members join clubs
- clubs aided by areas
- Education program
- Services/tools
“RailsInstaller has to work 100% of the time.”
“Our tools have to be rock-solid. New users don’t create tickets, because they don’t know what’s broken. If they tell you that it didn’t work, then it’s your responsibility to pass that information along.”
Use Toastmasters as a model, because they’ve had clubs for a long time, and those clubs have been growing and growing.
- officer roles - you don’t have to create the club, and do everything as well
- meetings with a purpose - you can’t have the same role year after year - make sure that there are at least two other people that want to your job
- growth, renewal - seeing new people come to your community should make you feel really good
roles (from Toastmasters)
- president - responsible for everything else :)
- vp education - manages the education program of all of the members - keeps track of the educational status of every member of the club
- vp marketing - in charge of getting new people into the club
- sergeant at arms - in charge of setting up tables, handing out name tags, sign-ups and other logistical tasks
meetings
- why did you come?
- can you guarantee it is always good? - new people should be able to depend on a consistent experience
renewal
- rails is great? share it
- club is great? share it
- new member experience - this should be a focus - someone should reach out to people that have shown interest in the attending the meeting
- officer elections - have a way to change who is in charge
Command-F1 switches the mirror of monitors on and off
Your club
- identify officer roles - find out who wants to help, and what they are willing to do
- opt-in to roles - now that people have roles, they will start solving problems like a leader
- why is everyone here?
- create great meetings
“RailsInstaller is only useful if you share it with people.”
Solution
- watch a new person discover rails
- fix the edge cases
- share rails again
“[Smacks head] And there was no reason for me to hit myself. And I regret doing it now, because I feel rather ridiculous now.”
“Ruby and rails on OS/X is not as easy you might think it is - you should not have to pull out your XCode cd just to install an XML gem - perhaps we should start including pre-compiled binaries in our gems.” [paraphrasing again]
RubyNation: Thinking Small
Smaller is better
Smaller apps are easier to:
- design
- build
- test
- debug
- scale
- replace
- sell
- purchase
You can use the tool that’s best for each specific job, unless it’s stuck inside of the monolithic app.
xeround - hosted MySQL
“Is it legal to marry an architectural style?”
RubyNation: Lightning Talks
Chloe
Faster data processing with rails http://github.com/mashion/chloe
Your code is awesome. Your copy sucks.
Andrea rocks! ‘Nuff said! :)
RVM FW
Enables the use of rvm from behind a corporate firewall.
Viruses in your video card
Video cards have a ton of computing power, and they run at the lowest level on the system, because things run fast down there. The possibilities are actually kind of scary.
MySQL performance tips
Maakit
Slides available on the Percona website.
Hack the planet
Remember how the world at large thinks about programmers.
strftime
http://github.com/saturnflyer/strftime
A really cool concept. I’ll have to devote some time to helping out with this.
Andrea no longer has an excuse for not knowing ruby…..she won the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial video by Michael Hartl at rubynation.
