A fresh Ruby conference organized by thriving local Ruby community. We’re keen on experimenting, value original ideas and diversity of opinions – as long as they’re backed with valid arguments.

You can meet : Georg, Bumi, Mike, Ralph, myself and our friend Nick.

We’re giving a talk

What is our talk about? About.. “Pit .. Brad Pit..Pit’s..ahhr! Just get out of the trap!!!” In our talk we will share some of the most interesting, absurd, or funny moments and insights we have experienced in past couple of years. As developers and business founders, we present the best of our own mistakes and show you how we got out of the pits we fell into. Believe us, we’ve been there as well and, hopefully, attending our talk will help you not make our mistakes. ;) It will be a serious fun! The talk will cover both technical and other subjects. Each mistake will get a 2-3 min coverage. Read more about us and our talk at the conference page and on their blog.

We love punk rock

Did you know we have our own band? No? Ok… now you know it! We’re proud to indroduce you to…

Vention Dention

Oh yeah. Vention Dention is on tour again… and we’re with them all the time. So the next gig’s are:

• wroc_love.rb, 10.-11. March 2012, Wrocław, Instytut Informatyki, Uniwersytet Wrocławski
• Nodecamp.eu (Details coming soon)

We’re planing some more gigs with them and everything will be announced on their homepage, on Railslove’s Vention Dention Homepage and via Twitter (@ventiondention). So stay tuned!

For now, just for you… Vention Dention:

Vention Dention Logo Animated

See you @ wroc_love.rb!

Andrzej Krzywda introduced me to a non-written rule of DRUG, which states “[i]f it’s your first time then you are presenting a talk”. I presented a quick talk about Travis CI. While it came as no surprise, that everybody knew the topic, it was especially nice to see people asking more detailed questions about current state, the future and sharing what they have done with Travis.

The people I met are tremendous and I will be happy to see them again on Wroclove.rb! Big thanks to all attending and especially to @kolarzowski, @piterniel for having me at their office during my leave. See you all soon!

proof:

We wish you all a wonderful christmas time!

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design.

You can find more information about the Coderetreat format and the event on the official website. For cologne all the information is on a github wiki and you should follow the office twitter account for updates.

After that, I guess in 2007 the rurug.de started with greater success. It was a meetup which first took place in the rooms of the Chaos Computer Club Cologne. Sadly I haven’t participated in that meetup very activly :( *bad bumi*

Early this year the meetup then has moved to cowoco and renewed itself with about 30+ people attending. The following events had been awesome! Great talks and even better discussions. Unfortunatelly, after summer we’ve became very inactive again. Not many people participated on the mailing list and the event hasn’t taken place in the last two months.

WE NEED TO CHANGE THIS!!

And now is the time to rethink the meetup.
I know we have so many awesome ruby developers here in cologne, working on exciting projects!

We need to connect, share, teach in our local ruby community!
Let’s work together to bring back one of the best tech meetups in Cologne!

To get this started again I propose the following things:

• changing the mailing list to something that is more accessible.
  This is something I’ve heard several times. The current mailinglist is kinda hard to follow and it’s hard for people to get into the conversation. -this is especially the case for new people.
  I also think the mailing list has some spam issues?!
• maybe using a google group for now. I do not really like google groups but it works for cologneJS.
• better organizations/archiving of the talk material like slides etc. – obviously ;)
• inviting more speakers
  speakers exchange is a great. I herby invite @joshkalderimis from Amsterdam to tell us about travis-ci
• meetup for some delicious Glühwein on the christmas market to discuss these things
  Date: 14th Dez. 07:00pm at Heumarkt

What do you think? How do you feel about the cologne ruby meetup? Who joins me?

Cologne.rb let’s unite!

(also posted on my blog)

So, I’ve decided to take matters into my on hands, and leave a post for all those, who are also bugged by no git autocomplete in bash on a Mac.

Thankfully, git already has its autocomplete script, so it’s a matter of just two commands:

But I like to take it one step beyond. To save some keystrokes, I’ve added some aliases to my ~/.gitconfig:

Now I can tab on git co and everywhere else I was used to on my Linux machine.

Today we had lightning talks about specs refactoring. Jan showed us some tricks based on his experiences from our latest open source project: railsrunners.org (Github):

Some simple spec principles

• Use clear descriptions for your specs in combination of using “describe”-, “context”-blocks
• Use contexts and descriptions properly, e.g.: describe "#edit"; context "with valid params"; etc.
• Use the –format documentation parameter to check your descriptions for specs, describes, and contexts. E.g.: rspec spec/controllers/participants_controller_spec.rb --format documentation
• Instead of manually creating associated models in your tests just to pass validations, FactoryGirl can automatically create them for you, e.g.:
• Then instead of:
• You’d simply have:
• Write one assertion per test.
• Stub requests using FakeWeb (Update: or WebMock or any other Request-Mocking-Helper), e.g.: FakeWeb.register_uri(:get, “http://static-maps-generator.appspot.com/url?msid=#{@future_run.msid}&size=950×300″, :body => response)
• Controller specs should only test the behaviour of your controller. Model specs test the behaviour of your model. Don’t mix the two! E.g.: do not test after_ or before_ save callbacks in your controller tests.

Take a look at the railsrunners Github repository: Github

Shared example groups

Sometimes you want to test the same behaviour in various specs or contexts. To keep your code DRY, you can use RSpec’s shared example groups:

If needed, you can move the shared example group to a spec helper and require that wherever you need to test for ‘successful responses’.

Further reading:

https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-core/v/2-0/docs/example-groups/shared-example-group
http://rspec.info/documentation/
http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/2010/11/07/specifying-mixins-with-shared-example-groups-in-rspec-2/

• Github
• Xing

So, to never ever repeat that code again (and to keep the code DRY), I’ve decided to write a simple gem specifically for this stuff. And thus the birthday gem was born.

Requirements

The gem has been tested against Rails 3 (3.0.9) and Rails 2 (2.3.14), and depends on ActiveRecord and ActiveSupport (for inflections), making it a perfect fit for Rails. It is possible to use it outside Rails project, but you are required to use ActiveRecord as your ORM framework.

The gem works with MySQL and PostgreSQL adapters, but you can write your own adapters, if you need to. If you do so, it would be good to fork the gem and add it there for everybody to use. :)

So, how does it actually work?

Handling birthdays wasn’t that easy before. Here’s what you have to do in your model:

That’s all. This one line enables extra actions on the “birthday” field (of DATE or DATETIME types) in your database. For example from now on you can search for birthdays

• on a specific date:
  
• between a specific range:
  
• and even at the turn of the years:
  

All these methods are essentially scopes, so you could also do something like:

On top of that, you get convenience methods for single records, like getting the age:

You can get any field to behave like this. For example, let’s say we want marriage anniversaries:

And it’s done, from now on you have convenient scopes to search and handle anniversaries:

Final words

I’ve done this gem, because I never ever want to write this piece of code again, I’d rather spend my time on actually coding the important stuff in applications, than to fiddle around with dates and birthdays. Hope this gem will be of some use to you. If not, fork it, and patch it to your needs! :)

Backlash @ Robot Unicorn Invasion Party 2011 by Backslash on Mixcloud

One of our new partners is DailyDeal. We’ve done some beginners and advanced courses in Rails covering stuff like testing, building APIs, advanced JavaScript coding and general design and programming patterns in Ruby on Rails, etc.

Oliver Hepfner, Director Software Engineering of DailyDeal:

The training Railslove provided under the direction of Georg Leciejewski helped us understand advanced programming patterns in Ruby on Rails. Our developers were excited to get a hands-on introduction into Ruby on Rails.

Next month, we will launch a few more courses with DailyDeal and with other companies, like Adcloud GmbH in Germany. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Ralph and Georg: ralph AT railslove.com & gl AT salesking.eu & team AT railslove.com

Travis is an attempt to create an open-source, distributed build system for the Ruby community that:

1. allows open-source projects to register their repository and have their test-suites run on demand
2. allows users to contribute build capacities by connecting a VM that runs a build agent somewhere on their underused servers

You can and should use travis for your open source projects as an continuos integration system. Travis is an incredible project and helps increase the quality of  lots of Open Source projects. So please head over to travis and setup tests for your ruby, node.js, erlang, … projects. – you can also setup your own instance installing Travis and use it for your private projects.

For more information check out the github page and the getting started section.

We’re really happy to be able to support Travis by sponsoring one of the worker boxes.

btw. Sven, Josh, thanks for mentioning us on your talks at Ruby Lugdunum and Frozen Rails 2011 this year. ;)

Btw.: have you heard about the Awesome Bot Factory? With the Awesome Bot Factory you’re able to create bots for your campfire channel. There is a bot to integrate travis to your campfire chat: simply ask the bot for a given status, like:

Jan travis:status Nerds/NerdPursuit
Choco Bits Bot Nerds/NerdPursuit is stable

Or get notified about your project’s new travis builds.

- Thank you, Travis-CI!

Resources:

• Travis on Twitter: @travisci
• Travis on Github: travis-ci
• Homepage: travis-ci.org

The last DevHouseFriday had cool talks too: @tisba talked about loadtesting in the cloud @killerg was talking about his PDF-Dragon idea, we had a interesting talk about Scala and Closures for Java (by TJ) so, thanks again.

Unfortunately someone has stolen an @adcloud chair from the office. Turns out it was one of the Railslove guys. At the event only handful of Railslovers were present: Georg, Jan, Lars, Michael and Dirk…. Apparently, it was Jan. He got his punishment for this. Now this Chair is his burden to bear, and he has to take it on every other DevHouseFriday Chillout meetup.

So, see you next time, the next DevHouse Friday Chillout is on the October, 21th. Venue will be announced soon. Jan the Chairman will also be there to throw rocks at.