Programming

A slightly belated report from the November Copenhagen.rb meeting. It was a lot smaller turnout than last time but pretty damn interesting none the less.

First Casper Fabricius asked the question “How do you teach the sellers to sell Rails to our Enterprise clients?”.

Together we worked out a series of bullet points he could use with his own sellers. I hope he posts it as it would definitely be useful all around.

We also got into a pretty lively discussion concerning this. I think most of us agree that hourly pricing is not really the correct business model for Agile Ruby on Rails applications as I wrote last year in Agile Consulting.

Then Thomas Watson gave a demonstration of UJS – Unobtrusive JavaScript, which is a new rails plugin aiming to improve the accessibility and cleanliness of your rails app’s html by separating the JavaScript behaviours out of the page.

We had a great meeting yesterday of the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. David Black was here and DHH turned up for a surprise visit.

Besides the regular beer drinking and networking there were a few short talks:

• Thomas talked about RailsConf Europe
• Olle did his HTTP verbs and rails
• DHH did a great demo of the whole new world of resources in Rails
• Morten talked about JRuby
• I talked about Crypto in Rails

Good fun was had by all.

For anyone in Copenhagen today I will be giving a short talk today about the use of Crypto and in particular my EzCrypto library today at Copenhagen.rb.

After the meeting I will post my PDF presentation.

As if Geoffrey Grosenbachs excellent Nuby on Rails blog and soothing voice on the Rails Podcast he has launched a great new business idea with PeepCode.

PeepCode is a monthly series of very high quality screen casts aimed probably mainly at rails developers. Each one costs $9 and is sold via Lulu. It really is a fabulous idea and with Geoffrey’s usual top funky style is brilliantly executed.

I bought the TextMate Basics for Rails screen cast as I know I have only scratched the surface of it. To be honest I also wanted to give something back to Geoffrey as his blog, podcast and funky plugins are always incredibly useful.

So in the first part of it he covered all the basic stuff in TextMate, that I’m ashamed to say I never was aware of. I’m going to have to go through it again to make it stick.

There is also great in-depth coverage in how to customize TextMate to follow your own usage patterns and environment using custom snippets and commands. I knew most of these already, but I really like Geoffrey’s approach to covering it. He’s persuaded me to immediately create my own bundle and add to it as I go along. It really is very easy todo and also very powerful.

I wish him lots of luck with this project. It really is a great twist on selling content.

Just released version 0.5 of EzCrypto my easy to use crypto library for Ruby as well as Rails. From a usage point of view theres not really much new, but I wrote a bit about it over on my nerd blog New EzCrypt release