Pelargir

For those of you interested in a trip to sunny Austin, the Lone Star Ruby Conf is now accepting speaker proposals. LSRC is a regional conference similar to the Ruby Hoedown that’s coming to Raleigh in August. It’s great to see these regional conferences taking off.

If you were one of the unfortunate souls who missed RailsConf this year, I’m sorry for you. If you happened to be at RailsConf but missed Justin Gehtland’s excellent Streamlined tutorial then you are truly of all people most pitiable.

On a more serious note, the tutorial was very good and has sparked a lot of interesting ideas for further enhancing Streamlined beyond its already hefty feature set. For those who don’t know, Streamlined is a Rails plugin that brings the declarative goodness of ActiveRecord to the UI. It enhances your views with full-featured scaffolds that include relationship management, quick adding of associated models, and much more.

If you haven’t played with Streamlined before, why not give it a try? With several fresh screencasts over at the blog, a bundle of new documentation, a new sample project, and version 1.0 on the horizon… there’s no time like the present.

Getting started with Streamlined is easy…

Read the rest of this entry »

For the homeschoolers who read my blog, I’ll be speaking at the North Carolinians for Home Education (NCHE) state conference in Winston-Salem again this year. I’m giving my distance education talk on Saturday, May 26th, from 12:30 to 1:30 PM in South Main 3. A few of the points I’ll cover include:

• Why distance education is a good alternative to traditional college for homeschool graduates
• How I earned my own four-year degree through distance education
• Which colleges currently offer distance education and how to choose wisely from among them
• An overview of the different methods that can be used to earn credit through distance education (portfolio review, CLEP, etc.)

There will be a few surprises too! I hope to see you there.

For those who may have missed my talk at RailsConf, you can download the slides to get a better idea of what the talk was all about.

I had a blast, by the way! The audience seemed to enjoy it, and I was pleasantly surprised at the number of questions people had about Teascript and the process of building it. About a dozen people came up to me afterwards saying that they had an idea they were mulling over, and my talk had inspired them to get started on it.

I’ll probably be writing a couple of follow up articles that go into more detail on how homesteading worked for me. I didn’t have enough time to cover everything I wanted to at the presentation due to the enthusiastic response from the audience. To those who attended, thanks for being there and making the talk a success!

Portland is rapidly fading into the distance as I fly back towards Raleigh. I’ve enjoyed the past six days immensely. The Ruby/Rails community continues to surprise me with its passion, dedication, and downright uber-geekiness. The highlight of the conference for me was the time spent between talks and during meals, sharing ideas and experiences with other developers. I’m totally worn out now, but I’m already looking forward to next year’s Conf.

Not everything was peachy keen, though. There are several things that bothered me about the Conf this year…

Read the rest of this entry »

I just arrived in Portland a few hours ago for RailsConf ‘07. I’m looking forward to attending the tutorial sessions tomorrow, not to mention watching presentations by fellow Rails geeks on Friday and Saturday. My own talk on homesteading and Teascript will be given on Saturday at 10:45 AM for those who are interested. Hope to see you there!

I picked up a neat TextMate trick while pair programming with Justin Gehtland on Monday. Check out a directory from a Subversion repository and open it in TextMate. Click on the root directory of the project and hold down Ctrl-Shift-A. A menu will appear allowing you to select from a number of SVN options, including adding and deleting from the repo, diffing files, and so on. Very nice, especially if you’d prefer not to jump to the command line for such actions.