Proudcloud Talks #2 – @dreinavarro on Ramaze



by Jay Fajardo

Last week,  Andrei Navarro gave the whole Proudcloud Devops team a good overview of Ramaze, a lightweight framework for Ruby.

@dreinavarro discussing light weight Ruby framework Ramaze

We were also fortunate to have Erik Lacson from Devex at the Proudcloud HQ as well during this edition of Proudcloud Talks. Cheers mate.

Check out Andrei’s presentation deck below.


PhRUG goes to RedDotRubyConf Singapore



by Jay Fajardo

It was explained to us that Red Dot is the moniker given to the tiny city state of Singapore by its citizens. It turns out, when you look for the country on a world map, it’s shown as a tiny red dot.

redotrubyconf

reddotrubyconf was held on April 22 and 23, 2011, at the Singapore Management University. Being the south east asian region’s first ever Ruby conference and so close to home, Jason Torres and I joined a large group of PhRUG members and flew to Singapore.

As anticipated, the conference had a more intimate attendee size which gave everybody a high value experience as we all got the chance to meet many rubyists and rub elbows with some industry rockstars like Ruby creator Yukihiro Matz, the Pickaxe Book author Dave Thomas, Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and Envylabs founder Greg Pollack.

Props go out to the organizers and their fantastic work, Jason Ong, Andy Croll, and the Pivotal Labs team led by Carl Coryell-Martin.

 

Ruby creator Yukihiro Matz

Awesome talks from the first day were had by all as Matz gave the ‘keynote’ and Dave Thomas explained how Ruby really evolved from the best of many languages. Ian Mcfarland of Pivotal labs gave a talk about Agile the Pivotal Way (which I swear I’ve seen more times than I really need to).

 

The original pragmatic programmer Dave Thomas explaining why he thinks Ruby is an amalgam of the best of other programming langauges.

That night, we all trooped to the Pigeonhole for PechaKucha where Manila based Steven Talcott-Smith gave a talk on his work-in-progress unified equation offered as a middle ground project estimation method. He places it somewhere between the from-the-hip approach and a painfully thorough story creation process.

The most energetic and (I believe) the most meaningful talk of the night was from pinoy rubyist Bryan Bibat. Bryan gave a compelling (ahem… love your own fellas) account of his continuing adventures evangelizing Ruby in a 3rd world country like the Philippines. Bryan sure made us pinoy rubyists proud that night.

Catch Bryan’s presentation with a full transcript here.

The 2nd day was a blast as well, where many speakers hurriedly rushed to creatively modify their presentations to include some not so subtle ribbing on Pivotal Labs. For some reason I can vaguely remember now, Pivotal (and their “way”) came of as a hard sell for the audience and the speakers.

The most ingenious was Greg Pollack‘s where he somehow managed to integrate a back masked message in his deck. Pivotal is Evil flashed for a split second between the back masked slides.

All tongue in cheek though.

 

Taking a break between talks. They had Red Bull flowing for that afternoon boost. Thanks @bridgeutopia for this snap.

The most memorable one in my book though was Tom Werner-Preston‘s presentation on git‘s innards, most particularly the intro about Github. It had a lot of slides of beer, beer on tap, and beer drinking.

That evening, they bought the beer at Uluru. Jason and I went home at 3am I think.

 

Tom Preston-Werner on advanced GIT techniques. Thanks for the ale Tom...

Since Github bought beers, I made sure to get some major action going on my Untappd check ins that night.

 

Some of the PhRUG guys enjoying some brew at Uluru. L-R Kates, Buddy Magsipoc, Ed (of Engineyard), and Proudcloud’s Jason Torres.

Thanks to Ed of Engineyard who bought a round of beers as well. His T-shirt says No ticket? It didn’t happen. Take heed.

Here’s a Google Doc that aggregates all the relevant RubyDotRedConf 2011 resources

Needless to say, we all had a blast and can’t wait to come back next year.  Hope to see these guys again on May 19 at the monthly PhRUG meetup.

Until then, Semper Fi, do or die.

 

 

Proudcloud debuts Elements.Js at the Manila Game Jam



by Jay Fajardo

Proudcloud’s @jasontorres presented the 1st beta iteration of ELEMENTS.JS at the Manila Game Jam last weekend.

Elements.js is a new browser based development framework coming out of Days of Thunder that uses pure HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to help you build Rich Internet Applications and games.

Lead developers on the project Jason Torres and Jopi Ardona worked hard to finish first iteration in time for Game Jam and were still coding just before we left for the event.

Jason Torres (@jasontorres) and Jopi Ardona busy hacking away at the elements.js code base just before we left for Game Jam.

The next milestone release for Elements.js should be around March and will be presented again at Roofcamp. Till then, you can play around with the current release as it progresses. Just visit the project website at www.elementsjs.com.

Gam Jam participants chow down before forming the respective teams.