Empty Thoughts

It’s that time of year again. Yes, when we all have the privilege of calculating how much money we get to fork over to Uncle Sam. But, it’s also a nice annual reminder, for those of us that have the privilege of programming in Ruby, that we are the fortunate ones. Last year at this time someone on the Ruby-Talk mailing list suggested that individuals that made their livelihood by programming in Ruby, should do something to benefit the community at large. And, I agree.

So if you’re wondering what to do, how you can help out, in what way you can give back, wonder no more. There are many ways to help out. In the Rails community there are individuals like Jamis Buck devoting a significant amount of time to produce in-depth quality documentation on the internals of Rails. Drop a dime in his tip jar next time you think of it. But Jamis isn’t the only one. There are many other individuals out there that are working hard, contributing to open source projects, and lending a hand in general. Feel free to Pay it Forward.

Perhaps you should consider giving a donation to Ruby Central, Inc. If you don’t know who Ruby Central is, it’s a non-profit organization founded to support Ruby internationally. Ruby Central is run by Chad Fowler, David Black, and Rich Kilmer. They are responsible for putting on the annual International Ruby Conference, the Rails Conference, and several regional conferences as well. At RubyConf 2006 in Denver, Colorado a participant asked Matz how the community at large could best support the development of Ruby and the team that is working on the future of Ruby. Matz replied that he thought the best way to support Ruby was to support Ruby Central, the public international voice for Ruby. Sounds good to me.

Last year I made a commitment to donate a portion of the money I made from writing Ruby code to support the Ruby community at large. Why don’t you join me and together we can do our part to keep programmers writing happy code.

Pragmatic Studio has announced that they will be offering Advanced Ruby Training in Reston, VA on July 18 – 20, 2007. I don’t know if I can swing another training this year, but if I do it will most certainly be this course. Those of us at Advanced Rails Training in Chicago got a little taste of what will be offered. We were fortunate to get an hour or so of meta programming and discussion of Ruby bindings by Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas. I left certainly wanting a whole lot more of it.

This past week I attended Advanced Rails Training in Chicago that was put on by Pragmatic Studio. Pragmatic Studio is Mike Clark’s training company and includes Ruby / Rails heavy weights Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas.

It was a great experience and I highly recommend that you attend one of the Pragmatic Studios in the future. What is always interesting about these types of events is that the value in attendance has to as much with the offline discussions as it does with the training program itself. There were so many great people that I had an opportunity to get to know and others that I got to get reacquainted with. I was especially fortunate because Mike Mangino, founder of Elevated Rails, put me up and chauffeured me around. I learned so much from Mike during my stay. I highly recommend his company if you need a quality solution for your next Rails project.

There was also another unique opportunity for the attendees of the Advanced Rails training program. David Chelimsky, lead developer on RSpec, was also in attendance and was kind enough to give us all a special presentation (including fine libations donated by Object Mentor) on RSpec one evening. David discussed RSpec, it’s history, it’s use in Rails applications, and how to make the transition. His presentation was exactly what I needed to get me over the BDD hump. I’ve decided that my next project will be using RSpec and hopefully I’ll have more to say about that as I get into it.

All in all it was a whole lot of fun. If you want to god deeper into Rails development, or if you’ve had your head down and need to get updated on the latest Rails approaches, like Simply Helpful, Capistrano deployment, Restful Routes, etc…, head on over to the Pragmatic Studio website and get signed up for the next available course.