(Photo credit: Kieran Huggins)

RubyFringe - described as a "pricey, limited-attendance smoozefest" by Ruby documentation co-ordinator James Britt or as "an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture" by the organizers - went ahead last week and appears to have been a significant hit. A small conference with a reasonably high ticket price (though far less than RailsConf Europe!), RubyFringe was set to be a very unique sort of conference with parties, drinks and out-of-hours entertainment laid on, and a limited number of tickets made available to ensure a more intimate gathering. The gamble appears to have paid off.

Praise

I'm not quite sure exactly what went down (I had to pull out of attending) but all references I've seen have been almost over-the-top with excitement and praise:

Soleone says: "Rubyfringe was amazing! So many good talks and great people. Best talk: Giles' presentation on computer generated music. Laughed my ass off!"

Rob Sanheim says: "rubyfringe was a blast, and now i can't sleep."

Lennon Day-Reynolds says: "RubyFringe after-party unsurprisingly turned out to be awesome."

Josh Merchant described it as "an amazing - inspirational - creative- experience."

Heck, there are far too many positive mentions to read on Twitter.

Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch wrote directly to Ruby Inside:

RubyFringe was a huge win. Unspace set out to raise the bar for software conferences, and I think that they succeeded. I hope that RubyFringe does for web conferences what Rails did for web development; show others that there is a better way, that it does not require corporate sponsorship, and that it can fun, artistic, and productive all at the same time.

Content

There are over 1000 photos from the event on Flickr.

Joey deVilla has put together some handy notes for most of the presentations.

Rowan Hick has put together a list of his RubyFringe highlights.

InfoQ attended the event and, I am told, will be putting up videos of several presentations on their site soon. Until then, the content of the talks is summarized here.

The next RubyFringe?

With such success, it's inevitable another RubyFringe conference will take place within the next year. If you're interested, Pete Forde suggests joining the Google group, and keeping an eye on RubyFringe.com for more info (although it'll be here at Ruby Inside too). It remains to be seen if the success of RubyFringe will encourage "avant garde" conferences elsewhere in the world or for non Ruby communities generally, but Ruby Inside wants to hear about them if so.

Autumn is a framework by Tim Morgan that makes it easy to develop powerful IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bots with Ruby. Version 3, a significant update, was launched just a week ago. The code is available on Github, so it's ready to fork, tweak and work on to your heart's content.

An instance of an "Autumn app" is laid out in a similar way to a Rails app. There are config, doc, script, libs, tmp, and log folders, containing much what you'd expect, as well as a leaves folder (Autumn refers to "bots" as "leaves") that contains any number of folders each containing data, helpers, models, tasks, and "views" for individual bots. A default Autumn app comes with two bots pre-installed called insulter and scorekeeper that you can use to learn from.

Autumn is a pretty significant piece of work and Tim has done an excellent job at documenting it, leaving almost no stone unturned in demonstrating how to create bots / leaves of your own with the framework.

You've used Shoes, Why The Lucky Stiff's GUI-app toolkit for Ruby, right? No? You've at least heard of it? (If the answer to this is also no, seriously chastise yourself now.)

Ernest Prabhakar has announced that two online "ShoesFests" will be taking place, involving why the lucky stiff and "friends," with the hope of alluring wannabe hackers (whether on Shoes itself or Shoes-based applications):

The goal of these events is to write and share fun little applications using Shoes, a clever little cross-platform GUI toolkit written in Ruby. This will allow us to test, document, and file bugs on how the various Shoes features work on the different supported platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), in preparation for our next major release on July 31st, 2008.

No Ruby — or programming — experience is required; we’d love to find out how easy it is for novices to learn Shoes! Of course, if you happen to know the Ruby C API, expert help is always appreciated.

There are two ShoesFests, each taking place for 24 hours, from noon GMT (8am Eastern) on Friday, July 11th, and from noon GMT (8am Eastern) on Friday, July 25th. The venue will be #shoes on the Freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net).

If spending a day on IRC, asking questions, talking nonsense, helping others, and otherwise hacking away on Shoes and Shoes-based applications with a bunch of exciting people sounds fun to you, make sure to put this Friday in your calendar.

Trollop is a command-line argument processing library for Ruby. Developer William Morgan says Trollop is "designed to provide the maximal amount of GNU-style argument processing in the minimum number of lines of code." It makes a refreshing change to the more popular, but generally scary, cmdparse. The homepage features some examples of its usage.

Once you've installed trollop with the usual gem install trollop, you could write:

require 'trollop'

opts = Trollop::options do
  opt :http_1_0, "Force HTTP/1.0"
  opt :http_1_1, "Force HTTP/1.1"
  opt :hide_referer, "Hide referer", :default => true
  opt :connections, "Set number of simultaneous connections", :default => 2
end

p opts

Running the script with no command line options would result in opt becoming:

{:http_1_0=>false, :http_1_1=>false, :hide_referer=>true, :connections=>2, :help=>false}

You also get a --help (or -h) option for free that describes how to use the options:

Options:
         --http-1-0, -h:   Force HTTP/1.0
         --http-1-1, -t:   Force HTTP/1.1
     --hide-referer, -i:   Hide referer (default: true)
  --connections, -c :   Set number of simultaneous connections (default: 2)
             --help, -e:   Show this message

Note that trollop takes care of assigning the short-hand individual letter options, assigning the next letter within the string if the previous ones are taken.

Another option is Optiflag, which present a more DSL-esque solution. Its official homepage features some compelling examples, though the simplicity of Trollop appeals to me more for some reason.

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Dr Nic Williams has been busy playing with iPhone and Objective C development lately and, unsurprisingly, has found a way to bring Ruby into the mix. He has developed rbiphonetest, a Ruby-based testing framework for iPhone / Objective C applications that uses RubyCocoa to provide the necessary bridge. As well as producing an in-depth 20 minute demonstration screencast, he has also packed some key information into his blog post.

If you're a Rubyist with ambitions of developing native iPhone applications using Objective C (and perhaps even Ruby one day), it's certainly worth a look (as are all of Dr Nic's projects, of course).

(Photo credit: slushpup - License: CC 2.0 Attribution)

Six months ago, we featured 11 Tips on Hiring a Rails Developer here on Ruby Inside (and it got a crazy number of comments), but now Ryan Ritirisi has put together a great list of 15 Questions to Ask During a Ruby Interview. They include questioning developers in a way that can separate professional Ruby developers from the hobbyists (or those who are only familiar with Ruby through Rails templates, say).

Pete Forde of Unspace suggests, however, that asking clever questions isn't necessarily the best way:

The best way to recruit amazing talent is to approach people that you already know are at the top of their game. At this point, the most important question becomes whether their personality is a good fit for the existing team.

Really, if an awesome person who is clearly smart doesn’t know the answer to one of these questions, they can learn it quickly with a little direction. That’s the advantage of having a team - you help each other move forward.

In terms of the actual hiring, it seems there's a much larger demand than there is a supply of Ruby developers. I get e-mails every week from people looking for Ruby and Rails developers and most of my contacts now seem to be inundated with work and aren't ready to take on more!

If you are looking to hire, however, here are some tips:

• Free Ruby Job Site: RubyNow is a very popular, free Ruby and Rails job site.
• Browse developers: WorkingWithRails.com features profiles of thousands of Rails developers (many of whom are Ruby developers generally also). One client I am assisting with Rails recruitment has had quite a lot of success in browsing the location-based section of WorkingWithRails and e-mailing people who sound interesting. In the Ruby and Rails communities, like few others, directly e-mailing people who strike you as potential candidates can be a good tactic.
• Sponsor a post: Ruby Inside has 16,000 Ruby (and many Rails) developers as subscribers. We are now offering a $40 per post "post footer" sponsorship scheme where you get up to 250 characters (plus links) embedded into a post. This means both subscribers and people using the Web site get to see your message. These could be a great way to target the general population of Ruby developers as a whole, since Ruby Inside has the most Ruby developers all in the same place. Interested? E-mail rubyinside -/at/- peterc.org.
• Job board: Consider posting on the Ruby Inside Job board. It costs $99 for 60 days and as well as appearing on the Ruby Inside sidebar, we do a monthly roundup of the jobs featured so that all subscribers can learn about them. I also believe SimplyHired will cross promote your job around their network.
• Mailing lists: Posting on ruby-talk and other Ruby mailing lists does not, from what my contacts tell me, tend to be very effective at all. Even posting on locale specific boards has borne little fruit. It's certainly something to try though if all else fails.
• Get blogging: Rubyists tend to be quite driven by transparency, taste, and exciting, interesting work. If your company doesn't look interesting and isn't interacting online, the chances of getting someone deeply involved with the community is a lot lower. This is why some of the more interesting Ruby-based companies (such as Unspace and New Bamboo) have blogs.. they're great recruitment tools, as much as they're a way to promote their services.

Lastly, remember that there are a lot of Ruby and Rails developers who do not read Ruby Inside, have not filled out their profiles on WorkingWithRails, and do not actively browse the Ruby jobs sites. Sometimes the only way to get the perfect candidate is to actively approach them. Finding these people might require using Google Blog Search (using location names along with keywords like "ruby" and "rails") or actually going to the events they're likely to attend (many of which we post about on Ruby Inside - such as erubycon and RubyFringe - others are very location specific like LRUG Nights in London).

If you have any tips of your own, are looking to be hired, or want to do some hiring, certainly leave comments against this post.

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Disclaimer: I have no financial connection to the Pragmatic Programmers and other than through receiving these videos to review get no direct benefit from this review.

It was only a few weeks ago I announced that the Pragmatic Programmers were getting into the screencasting business. The first Ruby related videos were from the Everyday Active Record series by Ryan Bates. The reaction to these across the Ruby blogosphere has been very positive, and true to their word, the Pragmatics have been quick to release some more interesting videos. The latest addition is the Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming series by Dave Thomas (of Pickaxe fame). Three episodes are available so far, respectively “Objects and Classes,” “Sharing Behavior,” and “Dynamic Code.” They cost $5 each and clock in at around half an hour each.

With the first episode, Dave starts off at a basic level by covering the history of object-oriented development and taking a look at the core elements of what makes up the object-oriented programming style. He moves on to looking at Ruby specific concerns, metaclasses/eigenclasses, anonymous classes, singleton methods, and the like. He manages to keep things at a level that’s immediately accessible to beginners (lots of diagrams are presented to illustrate concepts and relationships between objects and classes) but isn’t afraid to introduce more complex examples straight after. This is a common pattern throughout each of the screencasts, the contents of which are covered here.

I’d recommend these videos to anyone who wants to quickly get up to speed with the concepts involving classes, objects, and metaprogramming. I don’t believe Dave Thomas has done any screencasting before, but he comes across as a natural. His voice is engaging, eager, and authoritative, which makes the videos very easy to follow without drifting off. Certainly, these screencasts are a superb alternative to the explanations of classes, objects and metaprogramming in most Ruby books. If you’re still unsure, Dave gives a quick 3 minute introduction to the series (video).

Elsewhere: Antonio Cangiano has also reviewed these videos. Check out his review for a slightly different perspective.

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Pool Party is a new tool by Ari Lerner (of ProcessorPool fame) that makes it easy to automate the deployment, monitoring (using monit), persistent storage (using S3Fuse), and load balancing (using HAProxy) of EC2 instances. While intended to be application agnostic, there’s naturally a major slant towards Ruby applications in general, with support for Rake tasks a core feature.

Ari’s announcement blog post gives more in-depth details. Development is taking place on Github (where the README is somewhat more readable than with RDoc!) along with discussions at a Google group.

Ari presented PoolParty at RailsConf last week, and his slides are available to view below (or at Scribd):