[LRUG] Beware of the Nuby

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

> Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:46:29 +0700
> From: Pat Allan <pat at freelancing-gods.com>
> Subject: Re: [LRUG] Chat Digest, Vol 36, Issue 11 (Beware of the Nuby)
> To: London Ruby Users Group <chat at lists.lrug.org>
>
> Going to jump in here, even though I'm not a local.
>
> One thing we did in Melbourne which was quite a success was to
> dedicate one month's meeting as Ruby Nuby Night. We had a lot of short
> talks on basics about Ruby and Rails (classes and modules, blocks,
> routes, helpers, etc). If you think that's a good idea, feel free to
> borrow it.
>
> That said, more than half the value of going to Ruby meets for me is
> meeting people, not the technical topics (although they can definitely
> be interesting and useful). So don't hold back on going just because
> Ruby isn't your primary language (yet) - and also head along to the
> pub after and meet people properly.
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Pat


Another non-local jumping in...

Here in Portland (Oregon, US), we have similar issues in getting
people to speak -- our structure is extremely informal, and we're
doing well if we have a presenter more than three days before the
actual meeting.  However, we do also have a few projects with regular
or semi-regular code sprints.

Luz (a music visualization system written in Ruby) has had a few code
sprints [ http://calagator.org/events/search?query=luz ], and the
Calagator project itself (note the domain in previous link) has been
very active in explicitly inviting newbies and non-programmers to
participate.  This is a really great way for newbies to get to pair
with experienced Ruby programmers, get their code into a live app, and
generally soak up knowledge like a sponge.

I've also proposed doing a live version of "Rubyize This!", which
would work well for programmers coming from other languages.  I didn't
have the time to invest in doing the first one, so it hasn't happened
yet, but maybe soon...

Cheers,
-Sam