It’s time for another ‘Morning coffee’ meeting. You’re invited to come chat with your fellow designers and developers over a nice cup of coffee.
When: Thursday, February 4th, 2010, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam.
Please leave a comment if you’re coming, any questions you might have are welcome too.
LimeChat is a very popular IRC client built with RubyCocoa. It’s fast, stable, and it’s easy to write themes using CSS or YAML. Based on his experience, Satoshi will give you practical advice for building real-world applications with RubyCocoa.
HotCocoa is a thin Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks. It simplifies the verbose OS X API so that you can programmatically construct user interfaces without Interface Builder. This works by creating a mapping layer on top of the Objective-C classes. HotCocoa adds Ruby-friendly methods, constants and delegate techniques that look refreshingly simple, but do not prevent full access to the Cocoa APIs. Rich will demonstrate the current state of HotCocoa, show you how to use it to construct full OS X applications quickly, and what the plans are for the future.
Cocoa development can seem cumbersome if you come from a Ruby background, especially where you need to deal with XCode. Rucola makes it easy to follow conventions for application layout by providing generators, offers rake tasks for common jobs, and gives you various other handy helpers. Eloy will tell you about the philosophy of Rucola and walk you through the development of a simple Cocoa application using Rucola.
MacRuby allows you to write graphics intensive applications in Ruby because of the close integration with Cocoa. This makes it surprisingly easy to write games in Ruby, especially when you abstract a lot of the plumbing often needed in game development. John will cover the challenges of using OpenGL, discuss how to build game development tools such as level builders, and present a case study of how he built a side scrolling car game.
Even though automated testing has become very popular, it has never really taken off with people building GUI applications. There are probably two major reasons why GUI developers don’t write automated tests. First, writing tests in a traditional compiled language like C is cumbersome, and secondly, a GUI application is less straightforward to test than a library or a web application. Using RubyCocoa and MacRuby makes testing a lot easier. Not only for applications written in Ruby, but also for regular Cocoa applications written in Objective-C. Manfred will walk you through the development of a small Cocoa application and show how you can test the various parts.
Sofa shipped the first version of Checkout, their point-of-sale application for the Mac, in 2006. Checkout is written in Python using the PyObjC bridge to interface with Cocoa. Koen will talk about what’s needed to create a great desktop experience on the Mac and share his experiences with building and shipping a commercial Cocoa application that’s written in an interpreted language.
Instead of using regular slideware for their RailsConf presentation, Ninh and Hongli decided to write their own Wolfenstein-style raycaster in Ruby using the Gosu game development library. Gosu has been used for cross-platform, indie game development in Ruby for about five years now. Ninh will demonstrate RubyStein 3D and talk about why and how they built it. After that, Julian will briefly present the Gosu library and its design philosophy. He hopes to convince you to write a game over the next rainy weekend.
We’ve been able to add a few more seats to the Ruby on OS X Conference. You can get them here for a very limited time.
Registration for the Ruby on OS X Conference is now open. Tickets are selling much faster than expected, so don’t wait too long if you’re thinking about attending.
The conference is about building Mac apps with Ruby and Cocoa. We’ve tried to organise a conference that’s of interest to Ruby developer who want to get started with Mac desktop application development, as well as experienced RubyCocoa and MacRuby developers, and Cocoa/Objective-C developers interested in using Ruby.
We’ve gathered a great collection of speakers from the USA, Japan, and Europe, all of which are active in the RubyCocoa and MacRuby communities. This will be a small and intimate conference with sessions in the morning and afternoon, followed by an informal hackfest in the evening.
Eloy and I will be in Berlin Monday through Thursday. We’re not attending RailsConf, but we are meeting up with a small detachment of European Caboosers to hack on projects and have a good time. We’ve rented a big apartment near the conference which we’re using as our HQ.
If you want to meet up or want to discuss anything related to projects we’re working on let us know and we’ll hook up.
In the wake of RubyEnRails 2008 comes a special Amsterdam.rb meeting with presentations at the TTY office. Confirmed presentations are:
Hope to see you there!
When: Monday, June 30th, 2008, 8:00 PM
Where: TTY Office, Kerkstraat 342, Amsterdam
It’s time for another ‘Morning coffee’ meeting. You’re invited to come chat with your fellow web developers over a nice cup of coffee.
When: Tuesday, May 6th, 2008, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam.
Please leave a comment if you’re coming, any questions you might have are welcome too.
Eloy Duran and I are attending this year’s Euruko in Prague. If you’re also at the conference, don’t be shy and say hi!
It’s time for another coffee morning. Like always you’re invited to come chat about Rails, Django, Seaside and web development in general over a nice cup of coffee.
When: Thursday, December 20th, 2007, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam
Please leave a comment if you’re coming, any questions you might have are welcome too.
In a day or three I will be in Pisa for Rails to Italy where I am giving a talk on Ruby patterns in the Rails internals. Shout if you happen to be in the area and want to meet up, you know how it works.
With the summer vacations behind us it’s time for another coffee morning. Like always you’re invited to come chat about Rails, RailsConf Europe experiences, Django, Seaside and web development in general over a nice cup of coffee.
Last time quite a few people asked me about Seaside, but unfortunately I don’t know that much about it. Anyone with Seaside experience is extra super invited.
When: Thursday, October 11th, 2007, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam
Please leave a comment if you’re coming, any questions you might have are welcome too.
If you also happen to be attending this year’s RailsConf in Berlin, come say hello when you see Manfred or me running around.
Also, good news! While his keynote wasn’t too interesting, DHH did announce that the core team is preparing a Rails 2.0 preview release which they hope to get out by the end of the conference.
Let’s meet up one more time before the holidays. The goal remains unchanged: a good chat about our experiences with Rails, Django, Seaside and other next generation web frameworks over a strong cup of coffee.
When: Thursday, July 5th, 2007, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam
Please leave a comment to tell us you’ll be there or if you have any questions.
Yesterday the three of us attended RubyEnRails 2007, a Dutch one day conference about Ruby and Rails held in our hometown Amsterdam. We had a great time meeting up with all kinds of Rails developers, almost Rails developers and entrepreneurs.
Nic Williams kicked off the conference being his Australian self and sporting his caboose shirt. In his talk he layed out his views on the future of Rails.
Norbert and I did a live hacking session with Ruby, we showed a few ways to clean up your Ruby code and a few ways to make it almost unreadable. I think we lost some people along the way, but I hope everyone enjoyed the talk.
One of the things that struck me at the conference was that the talks were really diverse, with lots of real world examples and live coding. As Geoffrey Grosenbach mentioned in his closing talk, this really gave the conference it’s own identity. I hope to see more of this in the future. Next stop, RailsConf Europe.
Geoffrey Grosenbach interviews Robert Gaal
On the right Justin Halsall
Eloy Duran and Nic geeking out after a talk
Again a great meeting. I was amazed to see how much Rails is being used these days.
A little less than a year ago at the first meeting, only a handful of the developers visiting were using Rails professionally. This time I not only wasn’t able to find anyone who was not yet getting paid to write Rails code, but I also talked with folks from three different startups using Rails; soocial, SugarStats, and Wakoopa.
Time for another one. The goal remains unchanged: a good chat about our experiences with Rails, Django, Seaside and other next generation web frameworks over a strong cup of coffee.
Photo by Rodney Ramdas
When: Thursday, February 22nd, 2007, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam
Please leave a comment to tell us you’ll be there or if you have any questions.
It was a lot of fun chatting with other developers at our second ‘morning coffee’ meeting today. Here’s a short video to give you a feel of the event:
Since we really enjoyed the first ‘morning coffee’ meeting, it is time for another one. The goal remains unchanged: a good chat about our experiences over a strong cup of coffee.
We have decided, however, to broaden the scope beyong Rails developers. Anyone working with next-generation web application frameworks, like Django or even Seaside, is invited too.
When: Thursday, October 5th, 2006, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam
Please leave a comment to tell us you’ll be there or if you have any questions.
You can now subscribe to our podcast with talks from the Rails ‘show and tell’ meeting:
Subscribe with your default feed reader
Subscribe with iTunes
Right now we only have ‘Unicode in Rails’ available, but you can expect more talks in the coming days. It’s also possible to download individual talks.
A big ‘thank you’ to Andy Lo A Foe, Rien Swagerman from Resource Studio, Simon de Haan from Eight Media, Flurin Egger from DigitPaint and Julian ‘Julik’ Tarkhanov for their talks.
We also like to thanks Greenpeace International for letting us use the basement and especially the Application Development Team for helping out with the gear.
More photos can be found in our Rails ‘show and tell’ meeting flickr set.
Here’s the list of talks for the Rails ‘show and tell’ meeting.
Martin Lloyd from the Greenpeace International Application Development Team will give a short overview of the work they’ve done with Rails and Django.
Andy Lo A Foe will show us how to connect your Rails project to legacy Java and PHP applications using XML-RPC, SOAP and REST-style web services.
Audio with slides (AAC) | Audio (MP3) | Slides (PDF)
Rien Swagerman from Resource Studio will talk about his experiences with building a CMS on Rails that’s tailored to the needs of his design studio.
Audio with slides (AAC) | Audio (MP3) | Slides (PDF)
Simon de Haan from Eight Media will talk about why they choose Django and not Rails as their default web development framework. An excellent opportunity to learn what the other hot new web framework is all about.
Audio with slides (AAC) | Audio (MP3) | Slides (PDF)
Flurin Egger from DigitPaint will talk about the development of EntopicMail, a Rails application for mailing out newsletters that’s currently in use at organisations like Philips, NEN and the dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport.
Audio with slides (AAC) | Audio (MP3) | Slides (PDF)
Julian ‘Julik’ Tarkhanov will show us why the lack of Unicode support in Ruby is a problem when developing Rails applications. He’ll also talk about how he developed a very nice way to properly handle Unicode data in Rails.
Audio with slides (AAC) | Audio (MP3) | Slides (PDF)
Update: Added audio and slides.
The goal for this new meeting is to have a few developers talk about the stuff they do with Rails. It’s going to be a fast-moving and informal meeting; talking time will be limited to 10 minutes and there will be lots of opportunity for asking questions. We’ll have both dutch and english language speakers.
What: 6 short presentations by Rails developers
When: Thursday, June 22nd, 2006, 14:30-16:30
Where: The basement of the Greenpeace International headquarters at the Ottho Heldringstraat 5 in Amsterdam
Registration required: Leave a comment with your email address to register for this meeting (click ‘also leave contact information’).
I just found out that in Spain they’re drinking beer instead of coffee at Rails meetings.
When we proposed a Rails meeting two weeks ago, we thought we’d be having coffee with 4, maybe 5 fellow developers from Amsterdam. We never expected more than 30 people to show up, certainly not people all the way from Eindhoven, Venlo or Groningen!
It was a lot of fun chatting about Rails with all of these people. Please leave a comment if you’d enjoyed the meeting too.
We’re currently planning another fun event for Rails developers. We’ll post more information about it as soon as we get some things confirmed.
Update: You can find some photos here and here. For more comments on the meeting, see this, this and this post (all dutch).
There’s a lot of interest in the Rails meeting we proposed last week.
We’ll answer some of the questions that keep coming up.
Yes, probably, but we don’t think it will be too crowded.
Please remember that this is nothing more than an informal meeting at a regular coffee bar. It’s not a conference or seminar, there are no speakers or workshops.
It would be great if you could make it, but please keep in mind that there will be nothing more to it than buying a cup of coffe and having a good chat about Rails.
No, parking in Amsterdam is never easy. See bereikbaar amsterdam for more information on where and how to park your car.
Take tram 4, 9, 16, 24 or 25 and get out at the Muntplein. Cross the bridge to hotel de l’Europe. You’re now on the nieuwe Doelenstraat where you’ll find the Coffee Company after 100 meters on the right side.
In the last few months we found that there are more and more Dutch people working with Ruby on Rails. So far we’ve kept in touch by email and instant messaging, but now we’d like to meet up in person. Our goal is to have a good chat about our experiences with Rails, and of course a strong cup of coffee is a precondition for such a thing.
When: Thursday, March 30th, 2006, 9:30 AM
Where: The Coffee Company on the corner of the Nieuwe Doelenstraat and the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam
This is an informal meeting intended for people working with Rails, developers and designers who want to get started, and everyone wondering if Rails might be a good fit for their project.
Please leave a comment to tell us you’ll be there or if you have any questions.
Update: We’ve answered some of the questions that keep coming up in this post.
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