Yippe Kai-Yay it's the Ruby Manor 2 Roundup #1

[The Guvner]

Wotcha!

Last year I got one of my boys to write summaries of the chatter on the mailing list each week, but he's a complete muppet, so I'm doing it myself this year.

Here we go:

News:

Tickets: I opened ticket sales last Monday, and you lot promptly snapped up so many tickets that I had to keep some (15) back to make sure that everyone who wants to speak will get in.  Yes, I messed up by forgetting to announce the ticket sales on this mailing list, for which I apologise.  Needless to say, when the remaining tickets are made available it'll be announced clearly on this list as well as my twitter account (@rubymanor) and me old swampy bog (http://blog.rubymanor.org).

Schedule: Just like last year, the schedule is up to you lot to fill.  Check out the sketchy running order here: http://rubymanor.org/harder/schedule/ to get an idea of what I'm looking for.  Last year there were 30 minute talks with a slot of 45 mins, 8 minute talks in 15 minute slots and plenty of time in-between for unscheduled lightning talks.  This year I've pencilled in a similar schedule, but it's not written in stone.

Speaking of filling the schedule, onto the topics.  I break these into 2 types; a suggestion is a topic that one or more of you wants to hear about, but no-one has yet offered to give, whereas a proposal is a topic that someone has offered to give a talk on.  Got it?  Right you are then.

Proposals:

Vanilla.rb (thread: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_frm/thread/8976d62d61beb774)
One of my boys, James Adam, offered to give a talk about his vanilla sort-of-wiki / sort-of-data-n-code framework (http://interblah.net/vanilla-rb)

Browser-level testing: Selenium, Watir, WebDriver etc. in real life (thread: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_frm/thread/68ab3d181709bd70)
Martin Kleppmann has offered to give a talk about browser based testing.  Sounds like it'll be about techniques you can use regardless of which tool you use.  A couple of people so far have shown an interest and tried to shape the talk.  What about you?

Almost Proposals:

Cucumber (main thread: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_frm/thread/005292314c59ee7c, there's some stuff here too: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_frm/thread/7ee107d083047247)
Joseph Wilk and Matt Wynne seem keen to collaborate on *something*.  The directions discussed so far seem to be: tips and tricks for using cucumber in the wild (patterns, etc...), why cucumber over "traditional" testing, a discussion about the internals: Ragel and the new protocol.  Get on there and help them work out what to cover.

Suggestions:

Event Machine / AMQP (thread: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_frm/thread/8eac016a22eb507f)
One of my other boys, Kalvir Sandhu, said he'd like to hear more about AMQP and Eventmachine and some patterns for using it more effectively.  One other person is interested in the EM side of it.

Testing strategies (thread: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_frm/thread/29fc4cab6e57e012)
James Mead wants to hear a talk that discusses the different testing strategies available to us ruby developers.  We have a trend towards integration only testing, we have mock heavy unit testing, we have no-mock approaches, we have test spies, test doubles, oh my!  There's certainly some meat here, one of you want to chew on it?

Misc: (thread: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_frm/thread/7ee107d083047247)
This thread contains a bunch of starter-for-10 suggestions from my boys James Adam and Murray Steele.  They've suggested talks on:
MacRuby / RubyCocoa
Rack
Key/Value stores
Day to day ruby
If there's any interest in some of these, start up a new Right Said Fred (http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/post) to discuss them.

So, that's it for this round-up.  I'll chip in again next week with another, and every week until you lot invade my manor.  Now, off you go and flesh this schedule out or come December 12th you lot'll be listening to me tinklin' the ivories and singin' along to the Eastenders theme tune for 8 hours.

Stay lucky!

The Guvner.