Notes for pdxruby 10th anniversary meeting on 2012-08-07

[Igal Koshevoy]

We had a lovely celebration of the group's 10th anniversary. There was cake, food, beer, balloons and fun:

• Our friends at Crowd Compass hosted the event and provided tasty food and yummy beer ("10 Years, 10 Beers"). Thanks!
• Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki and all-around inspiring guy, blew out the birthday cake's candles.
• Markus Roberts presented another of his delightful Ruby hangman puzzles.
• Phil Tomson, co-founder of the group, talked us through the early days of the group's history.
• Igal Koshevoy talked us through more recent history and presented a timeline of pdxruby history at  <http://pdxruby.org/history>. The page lists not only major events, but the many contributions that members of the group have made to the tech community. A highlight of the meeting was a roll call of the many people there who were running groups, conferences, unconferences, hackathons, and other open culture events; volunteering at these; helping teach others in-person and online; contributing to open source, etc. Markus made an insightful joke asking whether pdxruby was a user group or an incubator, because pdxruby is remarkable for how much and how well its members contribute to open source culture.
• Igal Koshevoy talked about travis-ci <http://travis-ci.org/>, an open source continuous integration system. It watches source code repositories and runs tests to ensure that all's well, otherwise sends alerts to people so they can fix the problems. It supports many versions of Ruby, many other programming languages, many databases, and so on. Igal showed how travis-ci was used for Calagator to test many versions of Ruby against many databases: http://goo.gl/nnxkg and http://goo.gl/RR1YM
• Rogelio Samour talked about "I Know Kung Fu (or Using Neo4j on Rails Without JRuby)", you can see a video of his talk from RuLu 2012 at http://goo.gl/yfuef

Cheers,

-igal