RailsConf '08: Call for participation

Posted by David October 30, 2007 @ 05:45 PM

RailsConf 2008 is set to return to Portland on May 29th through June 1st. It takes a lot of time and coordination to get a conference of that magnitude put together, so we’re starting early by asking for presentation proposals from the community. The submission deadline is December 13th.

We’re really hoping to get some more advanced stuff this year. More nitty gritty details. More code on the wall. What did you learn from your last project that others could benefit from too? What techniques have you been experimenting with? What awesome plugins do you find invaluable? This is the place to share all that learning with the rest of the community.

A good reason to take that bold step into submitting a conference proposal is to raise your visibility in the community. I’ve met with lots of speakers who say that they got great business leads after presenting at a Rails conference. Your next client, boss, co-worker, or open-source collaborator may well be in the audience when you’re presenting.

Most of all, though, it’s a lot of fun to share and you tend to learn as least as much as your audience when giving a presentation at a major conference like this. I strongly recommend that you think about which areas of Ruby on Rails you’re especially passionate about and submit a proposal to share that passion.

Posted in Horizon  | 1 comment

Paris on Rails: December 10th

Posted by David October 29, 2007 @ 06:02 PM

Paris on Rails is a French-speaking Rails conference that’s taking place in Paris on December 10th. They have a great program for the day with 10 speakers (yours truly included via a video chat). If you speak French, check it out. The one-day event is 100 euro (or 70 euros before November 15th).

Posted in Horizon  | 2 comments

The Summer of Hack, 2007

Posted by Jeremy Kemper June 16, 2007 @ 01:33 AM

The hackfest is back! In sleek new form, the ‘fest runs monthly, starting now.

Without further ado: it’s on. Two weeks to go. Sprint!

Thanks to Working With Rails for making this an integral part of their site; thanks to O’Reilly for signing on as the first sponsor (first prize is a free pass to RailsConf Europe); and thanks to you for contributing the patches and bugfixes that keep Rails at the top of its game.

Go, go!

Posted in Horizon, Launches  | 1 comment

Ostrava on Rails 2007

Posted by Jeremy Kemper April 26, 2007 @ 08:54 PM

The first Czech Ruby on Rails conference is coming to Ostrava this summer: mark your calendar for June 22-23. Talks are in English and registration is open now!

Posted in Horizon  | 0 comments

Shiny new Subversion and Trac cluster

Posted by Jeremy Kemper February 10, 2007 @ 08:08 AM

You’ve all noticed the excruciating Rails svn updates and Trac molasses in the last couple of weeks. Following the release of Rails 1.2 we thoroughly overwhelmed our development server, no small feat for a hefty dual Xeon. Congratulations, all, for your hearty Rails appetite! Your sustained Mbps say more than words possibly could.

Our friends at TextDrive have stepped up once again to keep Rails development running smoothly and your production apps deploying predictably. Please give a warm welcome to our new development cluster, a load-balanced crew of SunFires and Thumpers hosting Trac at dev.rubyonrails.org and Subversion at svn.rubyonrails.org.

Subversion will remain available at the old dev URL so you needn’t touch your live apps. Feel free to migrate to the new URL at your own speed.

Posted in Edge, General, Horizon, Releases  | 6 comments

Hackfest 2007 winners

Posted by Jeremy Kemper January 29, 2007 @ 05:55 PM

We’ve reviewed, committed, and scored the patch flood. Congratulations to our twenty RailsConf 2007 Hackfest winners. Truly, a crack team of Rails commandos.

Over 24 days, we saw 263 participants open 462 tickets, submit 527 patches, and make 3169 comments. Great show, all—see you at RailsConf!

Posted in Horizon  | 0 comments

Hackfest 2007 and CD Baby sprint

Posted by Jeremy Kemper January 08, 2007 @ 02:36 PM

Ah, Portland. The open-source motherland. Pacific springtime beauty. RailsConf ‘07 nirvana.rb # => true and home of CD Baby, a little record store that digs Ruby and Rails.

We’re gearing up for a RailsConf hackfest at the Jupiter hotel just down the street and figured, heck, let’s start now! The top twenty Rails contributors between the new year and conference registration opening day will have a free conf pass and a room at the Jupiter specially reserved, CD Baby’s treat.

No kidding. Registration opens in a matter of weeks. Sprint!

Rails contribution is measured by real Trac activity weighted in favor of well-tested, committed patches but also accounts for new tickets and even comments. We’re joining forces with Working With Rails to track Rails contributions from the new year onward. To be included, mark yourself as a core contributor and give your Trac username in your account profile.

Have a Rails itch you’ve longed to scratch? Now’s the time! Happy hacking, and see you at RailsConf.

Update: Derek @ CD Baby’s announcement with more details.

Update: I announced contest close on the opening day of registration but Derek announced an earlier deadline on January 22nd. Sorry for the confusion! To draw a reasonable compromise, the contest closes tonight, January 24th, at midnight PST. (That’s 2007-01-25 08:00:00 UTC.) After the contest closes, we’ll continue scoring the backlog of patches submitted before the deadline then announce the winners this weekend.

So far, 258 participants have opened 443 tickets, submitted 501 patches, and made 2976 changes. Congratulations! And the leaderboard’s still tight with 17 hours to go..

Update: the contest has closed. The winners are..

Posted in Horizon, Launches  | 14 comments

New dedicated Trac server on the way

Posted by David August 10, 2006 @ 06:21 PM

Our current web and mail server has been buckling under the load of the recent frenzy. Especially Trac and mailman is taking it to its knees. So we’re going to add another server. Hopefully this can be completed within the next few days. It’s going to be dedicated to just running the repository and Trac. Thanks to TextDrive for their continued support of Ruby on Rails.

Posted in Horizon  | 29 comments

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Posted by David August 07, 2006 @ 09:14 PM

It’s finally official: Ruby on Rails will ship with the next version of OS X (see “Internet and Web”). Both server and client (on the developer DVD). We’ve been working with Apple for quite a while to make this happen and its great to finally be able to share it with the world. The love for Ruby has definitely spread inside Apple and we’ve been thrilled to see the level of interest they’ve taken to get OS X to be a premiere development and deployment platform for Rails.

The developer seed that was distributed today at WWDC contains Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2, but we fully expect to have Rails 1.2.x along with Mongrel, SQLite bindings, and lots of other Ruby goodies on the final gold master when it goes out in spring.

It’s been no secret that Apple is held in very high regard by the Rails community. Every single Rails Core contributer is running on Apple and the vast majority of Rails developers are too. To see Apple acknowledge this and return the favor is very rewarding.

Thanks so much to Ernest Prabhakar, Jordan Hubbard, and Dave Morin for making this happen.

Posted in Horizon  | 68 comments

lighttpd makes a proxy comeback

Posted by David July 30, 2006 @ 07:08 PM

As Mongrel continues to bubble to the top of the preferred production stack, we’ve started to evaluate web servers on their proxy rather than their FCGI support. The lighttpd crew has heard this change of priorities loud and clear and the coming version will feature a brand new mod_proxy_core module, which aims to rectify all the troubles of the old mod_proxy.

Jan Kneschke and crew are busy preparing this proxy module for release with lighttpd 1.5.0, but you can already now get your toes wet with the pre-release.

All hail the http pipe!

Posted in Horizon  | 24 comments

New Enterprise Ruby Studio

Posted by marcel July 12, 2006 @ 01:00 AM

Right on the heels of Martin Fowler writing up Enterprise Rails, the Pragmatic Studio has announced the addition of their latest studio, Enterprise Ruby, the first of which will be taught by Relevance LLC’s Stu Halloway and Justin Gehtland in Boston, September 11-13.

Some of the material they’ll be covering includes metaprogramming, domain specific languages, LDAP, XML, and web services. These topics and more will help use learn how to use the power and expressiveness of Ruby, and how to use it as your enterprise “glue.”

Those who attended Stu Halloway and Justin Gehtland’s talk at RailsConf on Rails internals already know how engaging they are as speakers. They are also currently working on the upcoming Rails for Java Programmers book.

Though not Rails specific, they do incorporate Rails in parts of the course and learning such things as LDAP and web services in Ruby is directly applicable to your Rails work.

Sign up by July 31st for a $200 early registration discount. You can register at http://pragmaticstudio.com/ruby.

Posted in Horizon  | 9 comments

European RailsConf talk proposals

Posted by marcel June 28, 2006 @ 01:38 PM

Talk proposals are now being accepted for the European Rails Conference, to be held September 14-15 in London. Accepted speakers will get free admission to the conference. Join a line up that already includes the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, best-selling author and passion maven Kathy Sierra, Rails core developers Jamis Buck, Marcel Molina, Jr., and Thomas Fuchs, Rails authors and trainers David Alan Black, and Chad Fowler, and Rake author Jim Weirich.

Proposal suggestions span a variety of Rails topics, including:

• case-studies in interesting Rails applications
• Rails add-ons and adapations (including experimental ones)
• analyses and critiques of specific aspects of the framework
• the use of Ruby in/for/with Rails development
• comparative analysis of Rails and other frameworks
• testing, coding, deployment, and all the rest!

The deadline for proposals is July 21. You are asked to submit a title, a short abstract, and a slightly longer description (400 words or so). You don’t have to have the whole talk written, just a reasonably detailed overview.

Send in your talk proposal.

You can write to David A. Black (dblack at wobblini.net) if you have questions about the proposal process.

Keep an eye on the conference website feed for updates.

Posted in Horizon  | 0 comments

The Railways at Reboot 8

Posted by marcel May 31, 2006 @ 03:33 AM

Finnish superstar Jarkko Laine, who’s been in the Rails community since day one, is going to be hosting a discussion this Thursday around 9PM at Reboot 8 in Copenhagen called The Railways.

The idea of the discussion is to bring together people who have already dipped their toes in the Rails koolaid with those who have contemplated doing so but have not yet made the jump. The conversation will be around topics like:

• What in the Rails way has struck people as most important? What has made the most difference?
• Real-world war stories. How has Rails made something possible/ easier/more productive?
• Whatever people feel is important to tell Rails newbies.

All Rails people attending Reboot are kindly asked to participate in the discussion and think beforehand of a few good stories they can tell to spread the love.

Posted in Horizon, Sightings  | 11 comments

Rails Day 2006

Posted by marcel May 20, 2006 @ 10:28 PM

Last June was the first Rails Day, where teams of two or three competed to build the best all around Rails app in a 24 hour period.

Well they’re doing it again this year: Rails Day 2006 will be held on June 17th, just a few days before the first official Rails Conference.

Last year’s contest had dozens of dozens of teams and almost as many prizes, including some pretty sweet ones for the teams that won top honors.

This year’s organizers are looking for your help on fine tuning the rules. So weigh in with your opinions if you have any.

Registration isn’t quite open yet. So rally the troops and stay tuned.

Posted in Horizon, Sightings  | 3 comments

In the works: Rails In a Nutshell

Posted by marcel April 26, 2006 @ 05:34 PM

Jeremy Voorhis of PLANET ARGON has announced that he has signed on to write Rails In a Nutshell for O’Reilly Media.

You can get more details and signup to be notified when it is available at the Rails In a Nushell site.

Posted in Documentation, Horizon  | 3 comments