{ :from => Delhi, :about => everything }

The second delhi.rb meetup was organized at VinSol on Thursday, 19th July, 2007. It was attended by 11 rails enthusiasts.
I gave an introduction to Full Text Search and Solr. And then gave a demo of acts_as_solr plugin. Seems it was well received by all.

Sur, then presented Advanced Ruby, with a lot of live code. Everybody was amazed at what all ruby has to offer for metaprogramming. Infact the talk inspired more people to write plugins. I definitely know of one which is being written and will post about it as soon as it’s released.

Here’s a pic from the meetup, very interesting titled by Sur as Manik with MAC.

It was a great evening. Looking forward to more of these.

update: Sur just blogged about the meetup here

Here’s the flicker photopool for the event.

Tags: delhi.rb, delhi ruby meetup

Here are the sessions I plan to attend at RailsConf2007.

http://myconfplan.com/users/mjuneja/conferences/RailsConf2007

Thanks DrNic for the cool app 8-)

Tags: rails, ruby on rails, railsconf

RailsConf Europe 2006 which I had attended at London in September 2006 was my first formal conference. It was organized by Ruby Central and Skills Matter and was fairly expensive atleast by Indian Standards, but it was a great exposure for me.
In May this year, I will be attending RailsConf 2007 at Portland, Oregon, being organized by O’reilly and Ruby Central.

With DHH, Dave Thomas, Jim Weirich, Chad Fowler, Jamis Buck and the team doing the plenary sessions, it is bound to be a lotta fun.

I still have to book my air-tickets, so if there is someone else travelling from India, do ping me and we could travel together and do some ruby/rails hacking enroute.
This will be my first trip to US and I am excited about that. US which by default happens to be the first destination for 90% of my fellow technologists from India is happening to me 11 years after I started my career.

At an early stage in my career I had preferred to take up an assignment in Japan rather than US because US seemed approachable any time while oppurtunities to work in Japan were comparatively rare.
Thanks to Rails for making that “possible any time” trip actually happen now.

Tags: railsconf, ruby on rails

When the idea of a Barcamp was first mooted by Jon in February this year, we [Gaurav, Amit and moi] quicky lapped it up. But as the initial excitment of doing an “unconference” mellowed down, doubts started creeping in. We were not sure of what was in store for us.
Would there be enough people to join the “unconference”? Would we get enough sessions lined up? What would be the level of those sessions? etc. etc.

Eventually Barcamp Delhi proved to be a bigger success than any of us had imagined. Not only that, it proved to be the harbinger of a barcamp revolution of sorts in India.

And now the stage is set for the second round.

BarcampDelhi-2 will be held on this Saturday, 9th of December at Impetus Infotech, Noida.

For details visit the wiki page here

Thanks to Impetus for allowing us to use their offices, we were having a very tough time finding a suitable venue this time.

I have not yet finalized what I would speak on, but I am leaning towards something related to testing in Ruby on Rails.

Spread the word around and see you there!

p.s: An interesting bit, I came to know about barcamp from Rashmi at the Uzanto Open House. I always thought the name bar-camp came from the legendary foo and bar variables. Rashmi told us that the bar in barcamp is actually “Bay Area Rejects”, essentially those who were not invited to the foocamp.

Tags: barcampdelhi, barcampdelhi-2, barcampdelhi2, barcamp

Marcel and DHH were very surprized to know that I had flown in from India for the RailsConf.

I enjoyed most of the sessions that I attended. With four tracks going on in parallel definitely I missed out on some very good ones.

• DHH’s session on ActiveResource was great. He demoed what he had talked about at Chicago RailsConf. I have also moved one of my projects to the edge to start playing with simply_restful.
• Marcel’s session on making RJS DRYer was also good. simply_helpful is a good way of doing this. It applies the same philosophy to the View side of things, that simply_restful applies to the controller. Using the simply_helpful plugin, the application can use a lot of meaningful default, hence making the views and helpers a lot more dry-er.
• Jamis just released a new version of capistrano and he demoed the cool new features. The slickest of them was the cap shell. It is a great tool to monitor multiple serves in a cluster from a single console, with the ability to run commands against only particular machines in the cluster identified by roles that the machines play in the cluster.
• Jim Weirich’s plenary session was great. He demonstrated a lot of common mistakes that programmers make, because of Ruby’s open classes. A lot of his talk featured around being good to other’s code.
• Dave Thomas and Kathy Siera were outstanding, entertaining and passionate as usual!

  Tags: railsConf, railsConfEurope

I am Travelling to London this wednesday, to attend the first RailsConf Europe 2006

I will be attending the pre-conference social PizzaOnRails on Wednesday evening. Then the RailsConf on Thursday, Friday.
I will be visiting the Shinnyo-en temple in Surrey on Saturday morning and be back in Central London by the afternoon.
Am flying back to Delhi on Sunday morning.

Anybody interested in meeting up to discuss ruby, rails, buddhism, India whatever… drop me
a mail.

Tags: railsconf, railsconf europe, pizzaonrails