Rubyists in Chennai

5th Chennai.rb Meetup on 8th July

2006-06-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

Seems we're all set for 8th of July meetup. It's crazy how sometimes
everything seems to fall into place like click-clack. This meetup is
especially sweet for me, because finally, I get a break from yapping all
the time! (and Rajesh gets a break from my bugging ;-). Guess what
folks, we have 3 talks this time, and all new speakers! Woo hoo. Seems
like it's Ruby time in Chennai ;-). So ladies and gentlemen, let me
announce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
5th Chennai.rb Meetup on 8th July

Time: 4pm (el sharpo)

Agenda:

Talk 1: "Rich Ruby" by Mr. Udayan Banerjee
Talk 2: "Rails and Rich clients" by Ganesh Gunasegaran
Talk 3: "Rails Deployment" by Senthil Nayagam

(phew).

Location:

NIIT Limited,
Garuda Buildings, 3rd Floor
46, Cathedral Road,
Chennai - 86

Landmark: Little ahead on the opposite side of Stella Maris Girls' College
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So all ye people, try to make it this time, three talks (with such cool
topics) makes it almost a must-attend meet ;-) Anyways, I'll pester you
all with a reminder a day before, just so you guys wouldn't forget. So
mark your calendars, and see you all on 8th!

Vamsee.

Notes of the 4th Chennai.rb Meetup

2006-05-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

A hopefully happy monday to you (talk about oxymorons). The 4th Meetup
was certainly a little bit different from the others which came before.
For one, it has the lowest turnout - 6 people! (maybe I should be
sending that reminder, afterall). But I can't complain, much fun was
had - I got to speak on a topic I care about, developer testing, and
also got to hear to Rajesh's very cool talk on his experiments with
Forth & Mindstorms. It might be just me, but this time it felt much
more fulfilling & 'right' to me. I can't exactly pinpoint why.

Ok, coming to the happenings, I started off with my talk, on the
current tools available in Ruby to do developer testing (I think I
should have named the title differently - "Developer Testing in Ruby -
State of the Art"). It started off with the simplest possible test in
Ruby - writing a small test case with Test::Unit. I showed how to do
TDD by adding tests, and then writing code. It's sometimes harder to do
than regular coding, because it forces you to think about design with
every test you write. It is a good thing, because if you're having
trouble writing test for a feature you're thinking up, it needs some
design clarity somewhere. Of course, you have the reliability of a
solid test-suite.

The talk continued with Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) with Rspec,
explaining on how BDD helps in creating a specification of your project
first, and then start to fill out the code that is missing. It's almost
like TDD, but different in the part that instead of thinking of
functionality by breaking it into testable pieces, you're instead
specifying how each part of your project should behave and then fill it
out. If it looks like BDD is just an abstraction of TDD, you might be
right. Rajesh explained after the talk as to why he has problems with
the concept of BDD and why many people think it's bogus.

I've also talked about autotest, which keeps a watch on your test
suites and continuously runs tests in the background and reports a
breakage as soon as you save a file with some buggy code. Very simple
and nifty tool, I look forward to use it in my rails projects. Finally
about Rcov, which generates coverage reports for your unit tests. I
explained about C0, C1 and C2 testing. I couldn't clear all the doubts
on this one, because it's a new concept to me too. But I feel that Rcov
is a tool you can add to your testing arsenal, and it will make an
enormous difference to the quality of your code. Ok, I'll stop here
now, or I'll be writing out the whole talk ;-)

Next up, Rajesh did his Mindstorms talk, and I must say I'm very
impressed. In simple terms, Lego Mindstorms has it's own custom
assembly language. Sending these instructions one by one is error prone
and tedious. So Rajesh is building a bunch of macros for doing the
common actions in Forth, which is a thread-interpreted language and
provides a higher level of abstraction than pure assembly (Rajesh,
please correct me if there's something I left out).

He showed some pieces of the video of "Grand Robot Challenge" an open
competition where completely autonomous robotic vehicles are supposed
to pass through a pretty tough desert route. I promptly copied the
video and watched it, it was inspiring, to say the least. He went on to
give some examples of the assembly instructions and comparable Forth
instructions, also assembling a mindstorms unit with the controller and
a bunch of wheels, which started turning on sending an instruction. If
you're into that kind of thing, it's pure fun ;-). It reminded me of my
younger days when I used to muck around with building a battery
controlled car with a DC motor ripped out from my Dad's old stereo. He
never forgave me for that ;-)

Okay, I will stop now, I think you guys got more important things to do
on a monday rather than read my ramblings. So see you all at the next
one, and have a great week!

Finally, special thanks to Mr. Udayan of NIIT Tech & his team for
letting us use the premises, enthusiastically participating in the
discussions, and providing snacks and coffee. (If you guys want to know
how cool they are, they arranged a new projector this time because my
laptop had resolution problems the last time around). Thank you very
much, from all of us.

Cheers,
Vamsee.

4th Chennai.rb Meetup on 20th May 2006

2006-05-15T00:08:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

Yes, it's that time of the month again, where we all get to travel some
distance in blistering heat to do some language geekery on a saturday
afternoon. Well, I hoped it would be a little refreshing this time with
new speakers and subjects, but I'm afraid it's the usual suspects again
;-).

Talk on Rich Ruby has been postponed as Mr. Udayan is going out of
station (we might have it in the next meet) and TracBac demo is also
postponed for maybe next month. Not to worry, this time we do have some
interesting things to share (we hope). So let me announce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
4th Chennai.rb Meetup on 20th May 2006

Time: 4pm (zigackly)

Agenda:

Talk 1: Testing in Ruby: State of the art (Rcov, Rspec, autotest,
Test/Unit) by Vamsee Kanakala

Talk 2: Agile Approach to bootstrapping custom firmware for Lego
Mindstorms - an experience report By Rajesh Babu

Location:

NIIT Limited,
Garuda Buildings, 3rd Floor
46, Cathedral Road,
Chennai - 86

Landmark: A little further down on the opposite side of Stella Maris
Girls' College main gate.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So there people, I apologize for the late notice, I wasted some time in
pondering on the meaning of life and other deep questions for a while,
and decided that Ruby hacking is much better than such brain-heating
questions (as if my place is not hot enough already). So see you there!

Vamsee.

Notes of the 3rd Chennai.rb meet

2006-04-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

Hi All,

Sorry, as usual my notes come a day or two after the meet ;-) . It's good to see you all there, and I didn't count, it felt like there are atleast 20 of us there. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Which, I think is a good number, and I hope we see more people, old and new in our midst.

The meeting started off a few minutes after 4pm, with my welcome and is followed by Rajesh Babu's metaprogramming talk. He started off with his approach to the talk, explaining that he would introduce metaprogramming from a Smalltalk perspective, slowly dipping into Ruby for comparision. He showed off the Squeak environment, and how the variables and the stack can be inspected at realtime in the environment.

He went on to explain that since Squeak is a self-contained environment, things like reference counting can be done easily, and proceeded to show some code of how Ruby is implemented in C. He showed us how things like method_missing is implemented in Ruby, and went on to show source code of active record on how some of the DSL aspects are done. There were questions on continuations and what led him to Smalltalk in the first place. He explained that Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, has done some work in alternative education, which Rajesh is interested in.
[* folks, I know I missed somethings there, please fill in if it's plain incorrect or something hasn't been explained properly. I promise, I will take proper notes at the meets next time. If anybody wants to do this, I will be happy to hand it over. Only qualification is that you should turn up for all the meets (almost) ;-)]

It was followed up by my talk on Rails 1.1 features. I spoke on some interesting new features like RJS templates and how they make ajax dead simple, polymorphic associations, how we can now add a real model for the habtm relationship with has_many :through, how you can now create your own api for your webapp with respond_to, and nested queries with the help of newly added 'with_scope' method, and how to get out of the scope using with_exclusive_scope (I forgot the method name, and led to some embarrassing searching through the docs). There was also some talk on smaller features, like newly added calculation methods to the model classes, cascading eager loading, etc.

It was followed up with some discussion on future events, frequency of the events, about inviting out-station speakers once in a while, having special meets when a really significant Ruby/Rails personality turns up, etc. Thanks to you all for coming, hope you had some fun and learned something important. We are gonna get much more organized, and have more talks crammed into that 2 to 2.5 hours that we can manage.

Special Thanks:

* There was also my request for some hosting space if possible, for our planned website. Senthil Nayagam of Broadspire has graciously offered to give us some hosting space, after speaking to his folks. Thank you, Senthil.

* I want to thank Mr. Udayan Banerjee and Mr. P. Sankarasubramanian of NIIT for letting us use their premises and taking the pains to organize everything at the venue, and making sure that we are comfortable, arranging snacks (the coffee was really good) intently listening to both the talks, and asking some thoughtful questions on the subject. We could not have hoped for better hosts.

Thank you all reading this mail (I know it's loooong), please add if I missed anything. See you all at the next meet, and I will publish the agenda for the next meet in the coming weeks.

Vamsee.

3rd Chennai.rb meetup on 22nd April 2006

2006-04-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

I have great news for you. There has been a great response for my requests for a meeting place. As you all know, I have attended and spoken at Chennai BarCamp and it was a great meetup. It's really heartening to see such meets happen in Chennai. Though it was not very technical, I met with many entrepreneurs, got to know about some very cool startups done by people here and Indians in the US. And yes, my talk was well received. I can say there is definitely a growing interest in people about Ruby and Rails. This can only get better.

In the BarCamp, I met Mr. Udayan Banerjee, VP (Technology Innovation Center) of NIIT Technologies. He was speaking on "Rich Ruby", a very cool open source web framework they are developing. Though it's in initial stages, I'm impressed with their work. I told him about Chennai.rb, and our troubles of finding a meeting place. He graciously agreed to let us use their premises for this meet. Their office is in Cathedral Road, which is fortunately accessible for all of us (I hope). On behalf of Chennai.rb, I would like to thank you, Sir.

I just spoke to Rajesh, he's good to go for the metaprogramming talk. If there's some time left out, I will do the Rails 1.1 features talk. So folks, let me announce:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3rd Chennai.rb Meetup on 22nd April

Time: 4pm (sharp)

Agenda:

Talk 1: "Metaprogramming with Ruby" by Rajesh Babu
Talk 2: "What's new in Rails 1.1" by Vamsee Kanakala

Location:

NIIT Limited,
Garuda Buildings, 3rd Floor
46, Cathedral Road,
Chennai - 86

Landmark: Right opposite to Stella Maris Girls' College
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If there are any other Ruby people wanting to do a talk, do let me know so that I can schedule it on this meet or the next. Please inform me at least 3 weeks before of your intent to give a talk.

Finally, I would also like to thank Mr. Senthil Nayagam of Broadspire who also evinced keen interest and convinced his colleagues to let us use their conference room too. Since this place might not accommodate more than 20+ people, we are keeping it as an option, so that we can shift the location if any contingencies arise.

So see you all on 22nd, guys. Mark your calendars!

Cheers,
Vamsee.

Notes of the 2nd Chennai.rb meet

2006-01-22T23:14:00.000-08:00

The second meet of Chennai.rb was very exciting. Partly because the room was full of people curious to find out about RoR, some experienced Ruby people. A lot of them are my colleagues, who are curious about the web framework that keep raving and ranting about. I hope they're not disappointed.

I really like the format of GLV happening before Chennai.rb meetings, because hopefully some people will get interested in Linux by coming a little bit earlier to the meets. Deepan Chakravarthy wrote a glowing review/MoM of the meet in the ILUGC list. Thanks for the support, guys, it's much appreciated.

It started off right from the basics, of how to create a rails project, slowly building up to the directory structure of Rails, showing an example of scaffolding, and linking up with other classes through has_many and belongs_to modifiers, and finally ending it up with a simple Ajax autocomplete demo using Script.aculo.us.

Though I planned for much more, I had to stop there because it was already 5:45pm. I expected for some questions, but didn't get any, must be partly because people are so new to the whole thing, so I'm expecting they're bewildered with the amount of info given at one shot. I'll slow it down next time, and try to give out info more clearly.

I met some really interesting people after the meet. There was Rajesh, who intereviewed me once at ThoughtWorks, quit with 7 years of workexperience, and is doing a start-up!! Wow. That is really fascinating for me. Looking forward to some great interaction in the coming up meets. Thanks all for coming, I expect there are more speakers next time. Deepak volunteered, so I'm expecting he will speak next time! I'm also thinking of some exciting new changes to the meeting format. Will keep you posted!

Greetz,
Vamsee.

Chennai.rb 2nd Meetup on 21st Jan 2006

2006-01-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

I'm happy to announce the 2nd meetup of Chennai.rb:

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Date: 21st January 2006 |
| Time: 4pm Sharp |
| Venue: Ma Foi Academy |
|Topic: Ruby on Rails: From Scratch to Ajax |
| Speaker: Yours Truly |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

Vamsee.

First Chennai.rb meeting, on a rainy day!

2005-12-18T17:44:00.000-08:00

Wow. That was a start with a bang. Saturday the 17th has been an exciting evening, with GLV meeting at 3pm and Chennai.rb meeting at 4pm. The GLV people including Shakti have participated enthusiastically, and I'm grateful to them for staying on.

There are around 15 people, some of them my colleagues who attended the talk. Not bad for a rainy day. I had doubts if anyone would turn up at all, what with all the bad roads and pouring rain. Finally, enthusiasm trumped the climate, and "Welcome to Rubyland" got started with what looked like a full room (to me ;-).

The talk started off with a little Ruby history, Matz's motivations for creating the language, etc. Rather than doing a full API-listing for the intro session (which they can get from other sources anyway), I touched upon the most distinctive Ruby features like Blocks, Mixins, (fully) OO, Duck Typing etc, mostly trying to make people comfortable with what sounded like alien language when I first approached it.

Afterwards, we had some snacks and sipped on tea and coffee, in celebration of Rails 1.0 release. It was quite a nice experience to share your thoughts to a highly receptive audience. I could see that Ruby impressed my colleagues too. I just hope they too jump into Rubyland!

Surprisingly, as they always say, you learn much more when you're trying to teach somebody. I'm admiring Ruby more and more. I don't know if there are better languages, but this is the best I have worked with so far. Now I understand why my boss liked Python so much. Dynamic languages set you free from the confines of the statically-typed languages like C++ and Java. You gotta do some coding in Ruby/Python to appreciate the difference.

We haven't decided on the next meet yet, but we will announce soon. Thank you all for coming, more good things to come!

Vamsee.

P.S: Shakti was nice enough take some pictures of the event. Take a look.

Party time!

2005-12-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

Hey folks, if you haven't already know it, Rails has just gone one-point-oh!

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2005/12/13/rails-1-0-party-like-its-one-oh-oh

In honour of my favorite web framework and it's significant achievement, let me announce a little party at this weekend's Chennai.rb meeting. Folks, basically, I'm cool with Chai & Samosa or Coffee and Pastries. You choose!

Plus, a simple demo on Ruby on Rails after the Ruby talk, and all the cool things in the RoR release candidates. BE THERE.

Cheers,
Vamsee.

New logo!

2005-12-10T02:02:00.000-08:00

Wow. I posted a request for help with the new logo in the morning, and we already have one (Check out the blog title). Mohammed Riyaz, member of Chennai.rb was kind enough to create a nice logo. Thanks, Mohammed!

Chennai.rb is 10-member strong already!

2005-12-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

Wow. I come to work and check the members in chennai.rb, it's superb - we are 10-member strong now. It goes to say that Ruby is alive and kicking in the developer mind share. Things can only get better now. Welcome all, join the fun!

Vamsee.

Chennai.rb Launched!

2005-12-06T01:40:00.000-08:00

Hello All,

In the lines of PDX.rb, Seattle.rb and other Ruby Brigades (you can call them ruby user groups) I'm proud to announce the Chennai Ruby Brigade, in short called Chennai.rb (.rb is also the extension of a Ruby file).

What do we intend to do? Simple. Learn & enjoy Ruby. Currently I'm thinking of a monthly meetup where in we can exchange ideas, cool ruby snippets, break our heads on continuations and drool at the latest Rails feature. Yes, I'm introduced to Ruby through Rails, and it sure is a framework worthy of the language.

We will discuss the idiosyncracies of _why's writing style (if you're a Ruby fan, you should know who 'Why The Lucky Stiff' is), try to answer the weekly Ruby Quiz and start zany/silly projects like Sudoku solvers. I promise, we will try to be very elitist, and only the coolest and the best talks will be allowed. That is, you give a talk at Chennai.rb, you better be prepared. Excited? Here's where you subscribe:

http://groups.google.com/group/chennairb

As an introductory session, I'm thinking of a one-hour talk named "Welcome to Rubyland" on Saturday, the 17th of December (I'm no Ruby guru, so if somebody has lots of Ruby experience, they're most welcome to give the talk). But remember, prepare, prepare, prepare! We all have very little time to blow, so let's make it worth the trouble. We will try not to conflict with the ILUGC/GLV meeting timings.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
First ever Chennai.rb meetup:

Date: 17th December, 2005
Venue: Ma Foi Academy
Time: Exactly at 4pm IST (No, the time is *not* stretchable)

(Having our meets on 1st/3rd/5th Saturdays means we can have the excellent F&H coffee - but no snacks though, unless some noble corporate soul sponsors it)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Welcome All! Let's have further discussions on the chennai.rb list! (Or you can comment here too).

--Vamsee.