Orange County Ruby Users Group

One of our own members, Michael Hartl, just published a book RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails. Check it out and good luck with the book!

Last night 4 of us (Daiyu, Doug, Steve and I (Scott)) met at Panera. After a few minutes of initial chit chat and food ordering we discussed our backgrounds with Ruby and our interests. Doug was under the impression that perhaps we weren’t a group interested in Rails and we’re just Ruby purists. We rapidly clarified that what brought most of us to Ruby was indeed Rails and we hope our mastery of Ruby would result in building more powerful Rails apps. This triggered the need to publicize ourselves as Ruby & Rails developers to the community.

We then went over OOP constructs, in general, and then how it’s implemented in Ruby. For the last hour we spend most of our time, at Steve’s suggestion, going over some of the Ruby Quiz. We picked the last one #121 and thought about how we might implement it. We quickly realized that at least for this time we would start at #1 and also go over the suggested results and figure out how it worked and why. We were quickly engrossed in multiple irb sessions picking apart the solution and learning some new tricks on the way. All came out of it smarter Rubyists.

We then thought it might be a good idea for future meetings to continue to go through the Ruby Quizzes as a group instead of just going through the book a-la reading group. It’s more interactive and engrossing and interesting to see other people’s solutions. It would be good to encourage others to develop their own solutions to the Ruby Quizzes before coming and to take upon yourself the challenge of solving the problems on your own before resorting to looking at other’s solutions.

Ruby Quiz can be found at http://www.rubyquiz.com/.

I didn’t make the last Ruby School gathering myself but Steve submitted a review

“Daiyu, Michael, Toby and myself were there. The discussion got off topic from the book pretty quick, but everybody seemed to be having a pretty good time – I enjoyed myself. Toby gave away several “million dollar ideas”, so if you weren’t there you’ll be regretting it when we each form our own startup and get bought out by Google ”

Next Ruby School is Wednesday, March 7th…

Sorry, no picture, I forgot to bring my camera and I didn’t want to use my camera phone.

There 6 of us there last night, 2 new faces (Steve and Fabrizio) and 4 repeats (Rex, Daiyu, Chris and Scott). It was nice to have Steve there (all the way from Pasadena) as he’s been using Rails at work for some time now and he was able to add some seasoned clarifications to the text.

We started close to our 7pm time, most taking some time to order food. We went through chapters 3-5, spending most of our time on chapters 3-4, discussing Ruby’s OO constructs, and blocks and closures. We didn’t get all of the way through chapter 5 but we figured it wasn’t worth spending lots of time since it was mainly about syntax and types.

It’s really great to have a laptop there and be able to play with Ruby in IRB when a question comes up like “what if we write such and such code, what would happen then?” I would recommend bringing a lappy if you can.

We’ll meet again Feb 21st at Panera again, going through chapters 6-8. Stay tuned to the mailing list and the Ruby School web page for changes.

(left to right: Rex, Daiyu, Chris, Toby, Stanford. Scott is behind the camera)

While we only got through the first 2 chapters, but there was a lot of off topic yet interesting talk about Ruby and Rails in general.

We’re thinking of perhaps meeting twice a month and Wednesdays seemed like the best night for most people, probably following a 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month schedule.

Come join us for Ruby School, a study group sponsored by the OC Ruby users group dedicated to increasing understanding of Ruby. Come join us at Panera Bread in Irvine, January 24th.

Visit the Ruby School page for more details.

Woo hoo!