A few weeks ago Sheila, Gabe and I met and discussed coding and CSS strategies. We enjoyed the exchange of information so much we decided to make the forum official. Now we’re holding a Rally Point meeting the second and fourth Wednesday of each month. Each Rally Point meeting will have one of our team present on a subject of interest to all the Imps and allow for a free exchange of information about the subject.
Our first Rally Point meeting was all about Rails 3 and Bundler and was presented by our code ninja, Jerrod Blavos. Jerrod demonstrated some of the coolness of Rails 3 by building an app that pulled images from a Flickr account using the Flickr API, stored them locally, then processed various thumbnails and displayed them on a web page. He built this app in a matter of minutes… a feat made possible by the awesome-ness of Ruby on Rails!
Jerrod also talked about Bundler, a gem that helps manage Ruby on Rails application dependencies. It’s a part of Rails 3 and massively simplifies the process of keeping gems in sync across an app’s environments (development, staging, production, etc.). Any Rubyists out there have certainly experienced the error message-gem install-restart-error message cycle that can occur when deploying an RoR app. If you know what I’m talking about and want to make your life easier, check out Bundler… it’s a godsend.
As with the first unofficial Rally Point meeting, everyone left feeling a little smarter… and perhaps a little challenged. Thanks to Jerrod for taking the time to put together a great presentation… now go out and download Rails 3 and Bundler and get yer Ruby on!
Additional Notes:
Mac OSX users should install RVM to aid in managing multiple versions of Ruby. Get it here. An excellent tutorial on Rails 3 is available here. I think they’ve kept up with the notes and such, but if you’re not comfortable dinking with the under the hood stuff on your machine, don’t.