ruby.org.au

[Keith Pitty]

Just in case anyone reading this is not yet aware, ruby.org.au has been launched!

Thanks are due in particular to David Goodlad and Ben Schwarz for their efforts in creating the site and to Aaron Moodie for the awesome logo.

As has been observed, the site is "minimal yet functional".  If you'd like to see it improved, you can find the source at https://github.com/rails-oceania/ruby.org.au.  You're welcome to raise an issue, or better still, a pull request.

Finally, membership of Ruby Australia is free.  If you're not already a member, you are welcome to join via http://ruby.org.au/join-ruby-australia.html.

Cheers,

Keith Pitty

President, Ruby Australia

[Tim McEwan]

Hey Keith,

How do we tell if we're already a member?  I'd like to avoid spamming up the db.

Cheers,

Tim

[Keith Pitty]

Hi Tim,

That is a feature waiting to be written ;)  Meanwhile, I've just checked and it would appear that you are not yet a member.

Cheers,

Keith

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[Daniel]

Should we raise issues for feature requests, or are they tracked some other way?

I'd feel more motivated to contribute if there were an obvious feature/bug list.

On Monday, April 23, 2012 5:48:10 PM UTC+10, Keith Pitty wrote:

Hi Tim,

That is a feature waiting to be written ;)  Meanwhile, I've just checked and it would appear that you are not yet a member.

Cheers,

Keith

On 23/04/2012, at 12:58 PM, Tim McEwan wrote:

Hey Keith,

How do we tell if we're already a member?  I'd like to avoid spamming up the db.

Cheers,

Tim

On Tuesday, 17 April 2012 at 15:14, Keith Pitty wrote:

Finally, membership of Ruby Australia is free.  If you're not already a member, you are welcome to join via http://ruby.org.au/join-ruby-australia.html.

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[Keith Pitty]

Daniel,

Please raise issues on github if you have any ideas for improving the site.

Keith

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[Leonard]

This is probably wildly off-topic....

Where do we raise issues or suggestions for Ruby Australia in meeting it's core aims?

Today @dhh was tweeting that the "Rails job market still is [tight]". One aspect affecting this is the lack of new ruby developers coming in and learning Ruby. I feel that it should be the responsibility of Ruby Australia to encourage Universities and High Schools to teach Ruby as opposed to Java or PHP. I'm not sure about everyone else but my university taught PHP as a web language (and now teaches PHP/Java from what I can tell). I know that if I had been exposed to Ruby (or Python) at university I would have spent much less time faffing around making crappy PHP websites or alternatively being confused and overawed by those "enterprise" Java monstrosities.

Has Ruby/Rails education advocacy been discussed as one of the goals of Ruby Australia? Should it be?

-- Len

[Daryl Manning]

+1 on educational advocacy. Anyone have an idea what USyd, UTS et al are teaching in terms of web development and frameworks these days? 

(I know during my UK MSc, java and C++ were the *only* programming options and the whole curricula was very, very Microsoft focused. It was swimming upstream trying to use php for web projects and/or ruby - hell, even a mac for that matter.).

D.

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[Bayan Khalili]

I know that "more" doesn't always mean "better", but there are still around 2 orders of magnitude more java or php jobs advertised than ruby. Universities are probably just catering for that.

Bayan

[ben wiseley]

+1 - i think the job market is really tight for anyone who codes right now - it's not just a ruby thing - but we get the better jobs :)

-ben

[Warren Seen]

It's a great ideal, but trying to shift the languages used for instruction is a big ask, as it would require the lecturers to actually rework the course notes, rather than working on their research...

The path of least resistance is probably for someone go to whichever uni you're targeting and do an intro to Ruby type seminar/guest lecture, in conjunction with either the faculty itself, or a Comp Sci students society/club/whatever if one exists. 

Get students interested, get them using ruby and get them out to the user groups... Sure, you'll expose less students to ruby than if they were all forced to use it, but then where do you think the bad PHP programmers all came from? :P

[Tommy Fotak]

Interestingly I've been listening to the Ruby Rogues podcast episode Programming Language Fundamentals where they discuss if Ruby is a good language to teach to someone first.

I came from Java to Ruby and I'm not sure that I could have travelled the other way as easily.

[Tim McEwan]

I've just updated the ruby.org.au site with the info from the wiki re: Jo's talk.  Considering we have the wiki page and it's more convenient if speakers can update their own info, can we investigate embedding the wiki inside that page?  Or perhaps just send the Sydney link straight through to the wiki?

By the way, for those in the rails-oceania github org: feel free to publicize your membership (here: https://github.com/rails-oceania) so that others know who to contact - I'm rarely the best choice. ;-)

[Leif Eriksen]

I've had good success with doing "career-mentoring" to secondary and university students, especially early in their final year. I typically approach an IT department and say "Would you like someone with mumble-mumble years of experience to talk about the industry and how to differentiate yourself from the mass of other grads who'll be hitting the job market at the same time as you?" Always had a positive response, and it's at these talks that I advocate open source, public contribution and looking for adding to your skills portfolio with an emerging tech/platform/skill. I typically talk about the Ruby-verse as an example of where a student can spend part of their intellectual budget (what/where you choose to spend your limited thinking time on) to build that differentiation.

The better students are the ones who pick up on this, if not already there, and will probably be the ones to turn up at the next Ruby event.

So that might be a more successful/achievable path than trying to attempt a course-ware change. Perhaps a road-trip to the major campuses (campi?) doing a series of tight presentations could be a fun event ?

Cheers

Leif

[Leonard]

I went through a few Sydney based universities went through their handbooks and tried to figure out what web technologies each university offers as part of their IT courses and made it into a google spreadsheet so anyone can correct me if they feel like it. Basically everyone either uses Java, .NET with UTS using PHP in one of their courses (where they also teach JSP!)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiXwL9nLLJg2dE9acHdUMzdvcjlIV21adUl1N0tkakE

It was rather depressing. Here are a few choice quotes:

UNSW 

Through a large project, you will get exposure to a number of different contexts in which application development is required (e.g. building a Web site and accessing a database). The programming language used will be object-oriented (e.g. Java). 

I find it interesting that building a database-backed website is considered a large project. 

UOW

 introduce students to User Interface (UI) elements in general and Web Forms 

covers the object oriented features of web programming in general and the concept of dynamically generated classes from web forms and their web controls in particular. Form processing, the interaction of web applications through SOAP (Simple Object Model) protocol 

 In case anyone has managed to avoid SOAP: be thankful.

The more I look at this the more I think technology and web education needs to improve. I can't find any mention of things like testing or source control and very little mention of open source at all. I remember that during my degree at UTS I was the one who introduced SVN to the other students - but only because I was using ClearCase at work... UOW in particular must be particularly hated by students with Macbooks being entirely .NET focused.Lief's comment was particularly insightful. I can't help but think that having people head to universities to talk about how to differentiate yourself, or even simply advertising the fact that there are such thing as real-world programming communities would be both extremely useful to students and useful for our niche too.

-- Len

On Thursday, April 26, 2012 2:58:26 PM UTC+10, Daryl wrote:

+1 on educational advocacy. Anyone have an idea what USyd, UTS et al are teaching in terms of web development and frameworks these days? 

(I know during my UK MSc, java and C++ were the *only* programming options and the whole curricula was very, very Microsoft focused. It was swimming upstream trying to use php for web projects and/or ruby - hell, even a mac for that matter.).

D.

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Leonard

This is probably wildly off-topic....

[Tommy Fotak]

Turns out UTas are listening, this is an email I received this morning;

"hi,

The School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Tasmania is currently undertaking a full curriculum renewal for implementation in 2014. This is a very exciting opportunity for you to influence the future direction of ICT in Tasmania.

For this renewal to be successful we require input from the Tasmanian ICT industry and any industry that has an interest in employing ICT graduates. We held a very successful form on the 26th April and we would like to hold another one to give everyone the opportunity to participate. On the 17th May 10am – 1pm we will be holding an industry forum to seek your advice on the career outcomes for future ICT graduates and the skill set Tasmania will need in future ICT graduates to support the needs and growth of the local industry. 

There will be a light lunch provided at 1pm.

If you would like to attend the forum can you please email Nicole Herbert (Nicole....@utas.edu.au) for further details – the forums will be held simultaneously on both the Hobart and Launceston campuses of the University of Tasmania.

If you know of someone who would be interested in the forum, please feel free to send this email onto them. We are interested in hearing from everyone who has an interest in ICT graduates."

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[Warren Seen]

:(

Bummer, I'll be in Singapore then, otherwise I'd try and go - the Launceston campus is 5 mins from here. 

Cheers,

Warren. 

[Mark Wotton]

I'm going to be contrary here and suggest the opposite: whenever university courses try to be "industry-relevant", they're always laughably behind. I would far prefer to get out of uni with a reasonable understanding of algorithms, operating systems and fundamentals of programming languages than any amount of industry-specific training.

Learning Ruby is just not that hard.

mark

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[Leonard]

That's fine, if employers are prepared to accept they'll be hiring people with little to no actual technical skills. The problem is that universities aren't focusing on proper "computer science" and are already providing a great deal of vocational training in order to make people more employable. The additional problem from our perspective is that universities aren't talking enough about Ruby, Python and Open Source and the community and are therefore "dooming" most students to be .NET or Java wage-slaves to some faceless corporation.... or something.

I don't think web development requires much knowledge of algorithms in any case. I can't think of the last time I sat down at thought Big O notation when I was creating a website. It used to concern me with embedded development but not with webdev.

Advocacy is important here and I think this community should be a part of it:

The founding purpose of Ruby Australia is to further the use and adoption of the Ruby programming language in Australia, and to support and encourage a vibrant community around the language and related technologies.

-- Len

[Andrew Grimm]

You sure you aren't just saying that because UNSW teaches (last time I
heard, anyway) haskell?

Andrew

[Mark Wotton]

I went to Sydney, as you well know:)

and first year CS at UNSW is now taught in C, I believe.

mark

[Gregory McIntyre]

I love this discussion.

I've long been an advocate of Ruby for teaching. I promoted using Ruby
to lecturers at the ANU about 12 years ago. I gave a lecture on Ruby
at a course about Python at UNSW. I have trained people on Ruby in a
corporate setting. Julio reckons I taught him Ruby, but he's just
being nice and flattering me. I love the idea of using Ruby to teach
procedural and object oriented programming principles, along with the
other languages programmers should learn.

At my previous employer, we sat around discussing what the best way to
train somebody to be a good web developer would be. University wasn't
our answer but neither was diving into industry experience. I admit
that we had no good answer. I would love to contribute in some way to
solving that dilemma. It's sort of on my career goal on my resume.

The best answer I have for that question is to think of ourselves like
chefs who benefit from studying in several Ruby kitchens and combining
that experience. I really enjoyed the code retreat exercises I did
with Andrew, Scott, Josh, Tim and others (forgive me) at USyd a while
ago (writing the game of life) and I think that kind of thing is the
bees knees for teaching: a practical classroom environment where the
culture is one of skill sharing and practice, and nobody is afraid of
getting fired or failing an exam or jeopardising their employability
for asking stupid questions, and there's no heckling.

I've seen people give presos at rorosyd and I've seen their hands
visibly shake. I've been to rorosyds and seen nothing but the backs of
tall men. It makes me question whether it's the best teaching and
learning environment.

If anybody here does or would like to teach and learn Ruby and web
development in a "study group" classroom setting, shoot me an email. I
dig it. Laptops, classrooms (maybe at USyd?), Corey Haines style
perfect practice, and maybe we'll build something as a project and
draft a syllabus for the universities, if we feel like it.

-Greg

[Tim McEwan]

On Friday, 27 April 2012 at 23:20, Gregory McIntyre wrote:

at USyd a while

ago

It seems I have to fire our marketing department. :-p

I've been interested in getting something similar to this happening at UTS for a while.  As a student I was in Eng/Sci though, so I don't know any of the IT peeps.  After speaking with @atnan, who was president of ProgSoc for some time, I kind of lost interest - he paints the landscape as very bleak and sometimes treacherous.

It's in my interest though (we've been looking for a dev for some time now - anybody want a job?) so I'm willing to help out.  I could help coordinate guest lectures similar to what @tagell organised in Melb a while ago.  I can also book rooms for study sessions & "meetings".  Any other ideas?  Len, do you have any contacts in IT?

Cheers,

Tim

[Mark Wotton]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Leonard <leng...@gmail.com> wrote:

That's fine, if employers are prepared to accept they'll be hiring people with little to no actual technical skills. The problem is that universities aren't focusing on proper "computer science" and are already providing a great deal of vocational training in order to make people more employable. The additional problem from our perspective is that universities aren't talking enough about Ruby, Python and Open Source and the community and are therefore "dooming" most students to be .NET or Java wage-slaves to some faceless corporation.... or something.

Yeah, I think teaching Java and .NET at university is abusive, myself.

But not having the technologies that people are using in industry explicitly on the curriculum does not mean that good students won't learn them anyway. One of the reasons knowing Ruby or Python used to be a good indicator for an employee was that they'd gone out of their way to learn it: it wasn't directly job-related. www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html may be instructive here, although I humbly submit that Haskell, Clojure, and Erlang have taken the place of Python in the "fun -but-probably-won't-get-a-job-in-this" stakes.

 

I don't think web development requires much knowledge of algorithms in any case. I can't think of the last time I sat down at thought Big O notation when I was creating a website. It used to concern me with embedded development but not with webdev.

What about learning not to do N+1 queries? REST architecture is a straight reflection on what can and can't be cached, which is a fundamental OS concept. Knowing not to run blocking services sequentially during the request-response cycle...

oh, and not doing lookups with a linear list when there may be thousands of entries (h/t to ruby 1.9.3 and @xshay) ;)

mark

[Leonard]

I graduated as an engineer so all my "contacts" (people whose names I still remember) are from the engineering department. If someone else on the list has better contacts (even if they're a UTS student) then we're likely to have more luck that way. But I coulf drop my thesis supervisor an email and see what happens I guess.

-- Len

[Navin]

I'm with Mark on this one.  In my experience as a student and a teacher at University, CS concepts and theory is what they're going for - not proficiency in any particular language.  I agree that they do tilt towards being relevant to industry but I suggest that this is never going to be their primary motivation - so their selection of languages is always going to be suboptimal from a vocational standpoint.  If you hire a fresh uni graduate because they've studied a particular language (or not hired one because they don't have exposure to a particular language), I think you are doing it wrong.  

I think that advocacy for Ruby is probably better directed at industry groups. Organisations like the Australian Institute of Company Directors would, I'm sure, welcome a talk on Ruby and open source in general.  Also, it'd be great to get speakers in generalist IT conferences that Executive types go to, and, get articles in the sorts of publications that these folks put stock in.  Think we'd do well to help them understand the depth and breadth of this community, and, explode some myths about the risks inherent in adopting open source software while we are at it.  It's these decision makers that perpetuate the "nobody ever got fired for buying/using <insert brand name or buzzword compliant tech of choice>" and largely why enterprises stay with outdated, expensive and miserably boring tech - we should help them out of that rut!

My $0.02,

Navin

On Friday, April 27, 2012 8:44:13 PM UTC+10, Mark Wotton wrote:

mark

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On Friday, April 27, 2012 8:44:13 PM UTC+10, Mark Wotton wrote:

mark

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