Rails Manitoba

January 9th at 7:00 PM at the downtown Red River campus on Princess in the lecture theatre.

Bring some code to showcase if you have something cool or educational. If not, come see what the rest of us are doing!

It’s happening! Rails Manitoba is meeting for their first monthly event!

Meetings will be every fourth Wednesday starting November 14th at 7pm at the downtown Red River campus on Princess in the lecture theatre.

Come down, admission is free! - Learn something new about Rails - Get help with problems that have you stumped - Meet the local Ruby on Rails community - Network with Rails-based businesses in Winnipeg - Discover a new killer plugin .. Or contribute one!

See you there.

Steven Soroka & The Rails Manitoba team

Not that I get any kickback from this, but if any of you don't know about Peepcode ( http://www.peepcode.com ), they make ruby on rails screencasts. I've bought most of them myself, excellent quality and value.

Welcome to Rails Manitoba…or I suppose in a more extended format: Ruby on Rails Manitoba User Group and Training Organization. :-) Basically, we’re a collection of people interested in the Ruby on Rails web application framework that live/work in and around Manitoba, Canada.

If you’re not using Rails currently, no problem. Rails Manitoba would love to work with and learn from other developers using similar frameworks. Are you a Django developer and want to showcase Python’s best of breed web framework? Are you a PHP/Cake zen master? How about Java and one of its dozens of frameworks? Come on out, network, show your stuff and let’s help Manitoba grow to be a hub of web application development excellence.

The plan currently is to meet every month at the Red River College downtown campus to network, share code, give presentations on any topic of interest to members. There’s no fee to join.

You might want to join the Rails Manitoba Google Groups mailing list we’ve created to jump in and meet some people right away, ask questions or just listen to some light banter. It’s low volume and very non-threatening.

Also, if you’d like to contribute to the blog, offer your services or in any other way help build the web presence and resources here, please email: brock@railsmanitoba.com

Welcome.

Brock Gunter-Smith

Meeting Location: The King’s Head Pub

Meeting Time: noon – 1pm

Attendees:

• Brock Gunter-Smith
• Peer Allan
• Steven Soroka
• Keith Tremblay
• Mike Arsenault
• Jody Baty
• Ranjith Udayshankar
• Mike (from RRC who came with Jody…)

The inaugural meeting was fantastic. Introductions were made all around. Great food was consumed. The Big Bang occurred and Rails Manitoba was officially launched! At the end of the meeting a few decisions/action-items were made:

Brock Gunter-Smith

• Talk to New Media Manitoba board of directors about assistance with funding montly meetings of Rails Manitoba
• Investigate on-going funding model to support bringing up trainers, hosting events and making future meetings more hospitable
• Create a mailing list through Google Groups to connect all local developers together
• Setup forum software for deeper discussion threads

Jody Baty

• Look into the availability of a classroom in November at the Red River downtown campus for meeting 002 of Rails Manitoba

All

• Brainstorm ideas for the first meeting topic and what content to put on the Rails Manitoba website

First Meeting:

The first meeting, to be held sometime in November, will likely have something of the following format:

• Introduction of each attendee
• Mini presentations
• Free-for-all discussions

Monday, September 24, 2007 will mark the beginning...I hope. A few Ruby on Rails fans are meeting at the King's Head pub in downtown Winnipeg. At which point I will suggest the formation of Rails Manitoba. A group where evangelism, training, support, marketing and explosive growth can happen for developers and small web companies in Manitoba. Wish us luck. Pending an impromptu vote, I hope to post the inaugural member list and even a list of founding projects to get us started.

Brock Gunter-Smith
Rails Manitoba

I love it. Definitely not a mainstream tool, but for those occasions where you’d like to blog about a concept, or try to explain something a little more esoteric, I can see this being tremendously useful.

http://sketchcast.com

The following are some quick links to get you started with just about anything you need.

Home Pages:

• Ruby Programming Language: http://www.ruby-lang.org/
• Rails Web Application Framework: http://www.rubyonrails.org/
• Rails Source Code: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/
• The Official Rails Wiki: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/
• The Creators of Rails: http://www.37signals.com/

Getting Your Feet Wet:

• http://tryruby.hobix.com/ – Explore the Ruby language in your browsers. 15 minutes.
• http://www.railscasts.com/ – Watch movies of other people doing cool things with Rails

Installation Links:

• Instant Mac OS X solution: http://locomotive.raaum.org/
• Instant Windows solution: http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/
• MacPorts Installation of Rails: http://duncandavidson.com/archives/164
• General: http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowtosInstallation

Extending Your Rails Application:

• http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins – Great collection of plugings
• http://www.railslodge.com/ – Yet another collection of plugins
• http://rubyforge.org/ – Repository of Ruby/Rails applications

Ruby on Rails Website Hosting:

• http://www.site5.com/ – Affordable shared hosting
• http://www.railshostinginfo.com/ – Generic list of Ruby on Rails supported hosts
• http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts/ For professional use look for those that support “mongrel” hosting as opposed to FastCGI. Your mileage may vary.

Ruby on Rails Documentation:

• http://www.railsbrain.com/ – Rails API documentation
• http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ – Ruby documentation
• http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/bookshelf/index.html – Some of the best Ruby and Rails books.

Blogs / Communities:

• http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/ – The official Ruby on Rails Blog
• http://rubyinside.com/ – Aggregates many announcements and links
• http://www.ruby-forum.com/ – Discussion forums on a wide range of topics
• http://www.railsenvy.com/ – Funny blog featuring spoof ads about Rails vs PHP vs .NET vs DJango…etc.
• http://rubyunderground.org/ – real developers talking about real projects and problems
• http://www.loudthinking.com/ – DHH’s blog (the creator of Rails)
• http://www.therailsway.com/ – Blog by a pair of Rails Core developers

Peer Allan of Bipolar Software conducted a quick technology presentation for an enraptured audience at New Media Manitoba. The following is a screencast of that event:

RoR_Sept182007_full_low.swf.gz