Ruby Install Fest #1 - Recap

[faithfulgeek]

Tonight we had our first installfest. While things went pretty
smoothly (+1 for no lost data), there are some improvements we could
make for next time. Below are some notes I took during the event.
However, I will not know anything for sure without hearing from those
who are new to Ruby. Therefore, please reply with your thoughts/
suggestions (positive or negative [constructive]). What would you like
to see more/less of? Did the Rails presentations help at all? What can
we do to make this a better event next time!

My ideas:

- Better prep for Windows, including Git extensions for Windows
instead of msysgit (something I found out about after everyone had
already installed msys)
- USB keys; all software available for anyone who cannot get online
- More focus: separate Ruby installfests from a Rails installfest. Get
Ruby/rspec going and talk about it in one meeting and then get Rails
going and talk about it in another.
- Was the screencast okay? It was very fast, so would having someone
actually present and explain the content help?
- More organization around volunteers: I definitely don't have the
bandwidth to plan this all on my own. Any volunteers are appreciated,
especially around setting up Rails on Windows; but also for any other
aspect of the planning process.

- Joe

[ilya]

Hey Joe,

I think that the event went pretty well.
Apart from me not being able to connect to the internet for good part
of the session
due to my machine being locked down so much by my company(this just
tells me that I need to get
a different machine for doing ruby development).
One thing that I would recommend is that the next time around someone
actually
creates their own rails demo app and goes through explaining how to
create it from scratch
vs having to watch a screen cast because even when someone was
explaining the screencast
that we were watching the person commenting was not aware of some of
the helper methods that
were being used.
Just my 2 cents.
Thanks again for setting up the event and it was nice to meat everyone
for the first time.
I am definitely planning on coming to the next events.

Thanks,

iLya

[Mike Falanga]

I think all the notes you captured are right on. In addition, I know
of at least one person who was keeping notes on what was being done to
his machine. It would be great to compile those notes and make them
available from the CleRB web site. I will volunteer to work with that
person to get some instructions created for Windows.

On Mar 16, 10:37 pm, faithfulgeek <j...@faithfulgeek.org> wrote:

[Jonathan Penn]

As the "person commenting who was not aware of some of the helper methods being used", I agree with iLya. :-)  I hadn't had a chance to see this particular screen cast before.  It looks like a great resource.  And being able to go back and rewind is very useful.  But it did move fast and there wasn't a lot of time for questions or to dig in and understand what was going on, unfortunately.

Last year, I did a presentation of building a Ruby on Rails app from scratch...a simple twitter clone called Flutter. Most of the people who were at the install fest were not at that clerb meeting, so it might be useful to walk though this again.  We're all running ruby and rails now so we can all follow along and dig into the api documentation to learn our way around.

For anyone who wants to know, here's a transcript of the lesson:

http://www.wavethenavel.com/clerb/flutter/

And here's the resulting source (it's using an older version of Rails...2.2 if I remember right):

http://github.com/jonathanpenn/flutter/tree/master

[John Miller]

For the breadth of what we we're trying to cover, you guys did a
fantastic job! Looked like everyone got a chance to get some direction
on what they need to do to get up and going.

My thoughts:

- Agree 110% that increasing focus would be best. And focusing on
installing Ruby\RSpec then Rails seems like a natural separation.

- Curious to hear the opinions of those that have tried it on Windows?
Is there enough pain there that it would make more sense to pass out
empty Linux VMs? We could still go through the setup process as a
group, so everyone would be familiar with the install process.

At CodeMash, I had the opportunity to sit in on Jim W. & Joe O.'s Ruby
precompiler session. What would you think about working though Edge
Case's ruby koans in one of our meetups? It's not something that could
be completed in just a couple of hours, but we could start it as a
group and it would be something that could be taken home and worked on
individually to help grasp how ruby works. Maybe we could follow it
with a reflection session to discuss areas that were confusing.
Thoughts? (http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans/tree/master)

Great job guys - really enjoying these get togethers!!

On Mar 16, 10:37 pm, faithfulgeek <j...@faithfulgeek.org> wrote:

[ilya lozovyy]

Jonathan,

 

I hope that I did not come off very rude as it was not my intention.

I just started learning ruby my self and there is a lot of stuff that I have been seeing that

simply don't make sense to me because I have not looked into the details of how everything works.

I hope that my remarks don't put you off from wanting to present again as I know that it is

not an easy thing to do. Hope to see ya again next Monday(please don't beat me up :) )

 

In regards to installing ruby environment on windows I would also recommend that

people look at http://bitnami.org/ they have a cross-platform installer for many different applications

including what they call a RubyStack which makes it very easy to install Ruby and Rails on windows.

The following is a list of applications that it installs which are a little bit out of date but they have a beta version of the installer that is coming

with newer versions.

 

Ruby 1.8.6
  - RubyGems 1.2.0
  - Rails 2.1.1
  - ImageMagick 6.3.6
  - Subversion 1.4.6
  - SQLite 3.5.1
  - MySQL 5.0.51a
  - Apache 2.2.8
  - PHP 5.2.6
  - phpMyAdmin 2.11.2.2
  - Git 1.5.5
  - Nginx 0.6.30

 

Thanks, 

 

iLya

--
Ilya Lozovyy

[Jonathan Penn]

Thanks iLya.  I wasn't put off at all!  And I do regret that I wasn't prepared to play narrator for the screencast. :-)

Along with John's suggestion, it seems that it may be good to find out how many people want to learn Rails, too, or just learn Ruby. I'm liking the direction we are taking in the main clerb meetings where we are digging into Ruby specifically using test driven design as a way to play with the language.

[Anthony Clayton]

I agree on predownloading the required software rather than everyone
downloading their own at least for the most common windows and mac OS
versions. I also think that a wiki page or handout of the install
steps for windows and mac would also be helpful. Maybe a screencast
(along with the written install instructions) of installing everything
from the beginning on windows as well as mac would be a good resource
to have on the user group site so that people interested in coming to
the ruby meetings could be prepared ahead of time. Streamlining the
install part of the installfest will leave more time to validate and
experiment on the installed machine. In general, I liked the format
of overview, install, demo and I think you guys did a good job.

Anthony

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