The First Ruby FunDay was held at Impetus Technologies, Noida on 22nd November 2008.

There was a lot of Ruby and a lot of fun.
It was an exciting event with a good number of developers in attendance.

People from various companies already working on Ruby formed the largest part of the attendees. Then there were a few Java programmers, who had come to checkout ruby or so it seemed to me. Also there was a group of students from PantNagar College of Technology. I really appreciate their coming all the way from PantNagar for the Ruby FunDay.

The event started off with Sur doing a presentation on Ruby, though he intended to cover metaprogramming, but a battery of questions from the audience didn’t allow him to go beyond the basics. Particularly developers from a java background were having a hard time embracing Ruby’s open classes and duck typing. Everybody enjoyed Sur’s session a lot as he let code answer audience questions.

Then we had a presentation from Aditya Babbar of Impetus Technologies. He talked about the problems faced in deploying and managing a Rails app. He didn’t speak about only the problem, but demoed a solution which Impetus has worked on to alleviate that pain.

Sid showed us how he used to make a Rails app multilingual using Gibberish before Rails added I18n support. Then he showed how life had become easier with Rails 2.2’s in-built internationalization support. His slides are online at slideshare.

After Sid’s session we were served a splendid lunch made at the Impetus Cafeteria.

Right after lunch, was the one of the most awaited sessions of the day. Gaurav built an AIR client for his fictitious app called Blabber! It is just a co-incidence that the application name sounds like Yammer. You can see the details of his presentation on his blog here.

Then Rishav gave a presentation on Sphinx, using Thinking_Sphinx plugin. He showed all the Full text search capabilities of Sphinx, and also proved why thinking_sphix is a better plugin than ultra_sphinx for beginners atleast. His presentation is online at slideshare

Akhil’s session was the last technical session of the day. He carried on Rishav’s introduction to Sphinx to show how Faceted browsing works with Sphinx. You can find his slides also on slideshare

And then we had the musical extravaganza. Sur and Hemant with help from everybody else present at the event, put up a great show with a guitar and their melodious voices.

A lot of presenters were presenting for the first time, but did a really great job. To say the least, we can expect the event to improve as we organize subsequent editions. It feels really great to be involved with starting Ruby FunDays in India.

To read a more detailed review, go to Ritu’s blog.

One of our aims when we started Geekeerie was to bring the RailsConf and RubyConf to India. We took our first small step towards that aim.

Here’s announcing the first Ruby and Rails Full Day event in India. It has been in the making for months if not years, and now finally it is going to happen on 22nd of November 2008.
We invite all Rubyists and Rails Lovers in India to participate and give us the enthusiasm to organize Fun-Days regularly.

Call it the Ruby-barcamp if you may. Everybody is welcome to speak, but send us a summary of what you would speak about.
This will be an event for the Geeks by the geeks and so we want to ensure hardcore technical sessions.
The only criteria for this one is “more code, less talk”. And of course it has to be related to Ruby or Ruby on Rails.

For event details and participation confirmation: visit http://rubyonrails.in/events/3

Have a day full of Fun and Ruby.
Special Thanks to Impetus Technologies in Noida for providing the venue.

It was a hectic weekend. We started a new batch for Ruby on Rails Training for Working Professionals. Though I was involved more in pre-sales and some logistics, it was by and large Sur’s hardwork that we could start this batch. He took the class on Saturday, inspite of it being his birthday. I remember that he did not want to work on his birthday, but the enthusiasm of the new batch got better of his desire to take an off on his birthday

Rails for working professionals allows individuals already working with other technologies or domains to learn Rails. These professionals are time starved to actually do a lot of study on their own. Our course helps them get started and more importantly stay on the course. They just need to show up, we do the rest

Ruby on Rails is growing in India. There are many startups as well as the biggies who have adopted Ruby on Rails, but the workforce is still not there. A lot of time even the developers who call themselves Ruby on Rails developers, do not actually fully understand or make use of the magic that Rails provides. They end up using Ruby on Rails just like any other web development platform, which incidentally it is not.

Last week I and Manik attended the OSSCamp. I conducted a talk on basics of Ruby On Rails.

Time is always a constraint in such diversified un-conferences. My plan was to demonstrate the whole basics of Rails including AR, ActionPack and basic Routing.  But the irony was that most of the  attendees had  heard the word RubyOnRails for the first time when it was written on the bulletin board for my presentation.

I started with ActiveRecord which alone was enough to consume the half an hour, which was alloted to me for the talk.

Many of the attendees started appreciating Rails just after seeing the magical associations. Like me they were also wishing to let me have more time to continue on Rails but it wasn’t a Rails event.

I had expected more live coding on other languages/frameworks from the corresponding presentations which were on agenda for the day like some interesting topics of my choice Python, DJango, PGSQL.

All in all it was a good day out with the geeks.

I and Manik were seriously discussing why not to have a full day Ruby/Rails event in Delhi. More of a workshop than mere presentations. And actually we decided to have one such meet-up very soon in Delhi. Watch out this space for more information on it.