September 29, 2008 @ 05:11 PM by nap · 0 comments
Registration for the 2008 Rails Rumble opened last Friday. If you haven’t already registered and want to compete, you better hurry up. There are only 25 seats remaining (out of a maximum of 200!) at the time of this writing. I’m guessing those will be gone very, very soon.
We’ve been working hard to make this years competition even better than last year and I think everyone is going to have a lot of fun. In addition to all the great prizes that sponsors are putting on the table, and the insane amount of community goodwill surrounding the event, there are also a number of companies running workshare programs. If you’re a fan of the coworking concept you may want to check these out. I know I’m wishing there was one in my town.
On the other hand, if you’re geographically isolated from the rest of the Ruby world, don’t despair! It’s a virtual competition and you can compete from anywhere. Look at it as a great opportunity to assemble a distributed team of entrepreneurially-minded developers and designers and see how well you can work with each other. If you’re looking for people or ideas, make sure to check out the #railsrumble channel on the Freenode IRC network or post to the blog.
September 15, 2008 @ 05:46 PM by nap · 0 comments
I've firmed up a few speaking gigs for the next couple months. And I wanted to share.
First of all, tomorrow night, September 16th, I'll be presenting a "casual intro" to every-day Git usage at NH.rb. Brian Turnbull and Scott Garman will also be presenting, on HTTP and Rails deployment stacks, respectively.
If you live in the ME/NH/Northern MA area and are interested in Ruby, I really encourage you to come to these meetings. They're a great way to meet other local developers and learn about new cutting edge topics. If you can't make this one, the next one is scheduled for October 21st (they're always on the third Tuesday of the month). I'm scheduled to speak at that one, too. Topic is currently TBD but I'm sure we'll come up with something fun.
Meeting other Rubyists and learning about hot new tech isn't enough of a reward in and of itself? Well, there's free swag too. This month we'll be giving away a few copies of my new book, Practical Rails Plugins along with some other Apress goodies (thanks Apress!).
NH.rb is also giving way a free core conference pass to the upcoming Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference (Boston, November 17-20). Pretty great, right? Sounds like this is going to be a great conference and they have a bunch of top notch speakers lined up. I'll be there too (how was that for a segue?), speaking about Rails Plugin development strategies on the first day of the event. Hope to see you there!
August 31, 2008 @ 11:07 PM by nap · 0 comments
The JQuery team just announced the agenda for JQueryConf 2008 and it looks pretty solid! I'm happy that I registered early, as it appears to have sold out.
Last year's "camp" was great and I'm sure this year will be even better, with two tracks to cater to both beginning and advanced developers. The only item from my wish list that's missing from the agenda is unit testing JQuery client code (and plugins). Oh well! If you're interested in this topic, Chad Meyers just wrote up a great intro to using JQuery's very own QUnit testrunner over on his blog. Good stuff!
Update 9/29: I posted a summary of conference highlights over at DDJ Code Talk.
