Oops! I forgot to post the weekly Ruby news updates from Ruby Weekly to Ruby Inside in February so.. here's a mega roundup of all that was new in the Ruby and Rails worlds in February 2012. I'll try to keep posting every week from here on - sorry.
Ludum Dare is an online accelerated game development event that focuses on regular 48 hour competitions. Think Rails Rumble but for games! It's been around since 2002 but has had a big publicity boost recently due to the participation of Notch, the creator of the mind-bogglingly popular indie game Minecraft.
Between August 19—20, 2011, Madison, Wisconsin plays host to thirty-seven speakers and panelists to discuss Ruby, OSS, and community in the form of Madison Ruby Conference. Speakers include Jeff Casimir, Giles Bowkett, Bryan Liles, Sven Fuchs, Steve Klabnik, Brian Hogan, Jacqui Cox, Lori Olson, Gerred Dillon, Barry Hess, and Chad Pytel amongst others.
EuRuKo is the brand of Europe's principal Ruby conference series and EuRuKo 2010 took place in late May. Why, then, am I posting about it in August? First, I'm a strong supporter of EuRuKo and promised to post a roundup of the event here. Secondly, it turns out it took a while for the videos to all be uploaded ;-) Third, I've taken my time in getting round to it. Nonetheless, there are some amazing presentations you can watch and they're still fewer than three months out of date!
We'd like to invite you to RubyConf Uruguay, which will take place this October on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th, in Montevideo. This will be a single-track conference aimed at developers who want to learn or get up-to-date with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Testing, SCRUM, JavaScript, SQL vs NoSQL, etc.
Ruby User Groups (RUGs, for short) are typically informal organizations put together to encourage Ruby developers with certain areas to get together, share ideas, and, often, to have some fun. If you're lacking for inspiration or want to get to know some Rubyists within certain parts of the world (or just around the corner, if you're lucky), heading to a Ruby User Groups' meeting can open a lot of doors. But how can you find them?
If you fancy a trip to the land of fried confectionary and heart disease, the Scottish Ruby Conference (previously Scotland on Rails) is selling tickets for its third event: Scottish Ruby Conference 2010. It takes place on 26-27 March, 2010 and the early bird tickets sold out in a mere 2 hours.. but there are full price tickets still available at £195 each (still a good deal really).
The 1-day WindyCityRails conference happened again this year, this time in downtown Chicago at the Westin Hotel on September 12. Reviews were generally positive with the conference sessions balancing immediately-useful Ruby and Rails tips with related concepts like functional programming and design. All of the main track sessions were professionally recorded and are available through the official website, though I've linked to each of them individually below as well:
I attended the Rails Underground conference in London at the weekend (July 24-25, 2009). As always seems to be the case at these events, I got the most value out of the more theoretical and opinion-based talks rather than 'how-to' style presentations. Having said that, Pat Allan and George Palmer gave great talks on their respective thinking_sphinx and couch_foo plugins.
Registration for RubyConf 2008 is now open. The schedule consists of three heavily packed days of presentations, with three separate talks taking place at any given time.