Ruby Camp at Sitepro

On Saturday, February 13th, Sitepro was the proud host to the first ever Chippewa Valley Ruby Camp.  Developers from all over the Chippewa Valley and even into Minnesota were in attendance.

I'm sure many of you are wondering what a Ruby Camp is.  No, a bunch of web developers didn't camp out in the snow out in front of the Sitepro building telling stories and roasing marshmallows over a fire.  While that would be a lot of fun, it's a bit cold out for that in the middle of February. 

A code camp is a form of an unconference, and an unconference is an event that is facilitated and driven by its participants.  The event is usually centered around a theme, is usually free to all, and has no sponsored presentations.  In this case, the theme was Ruby, which is an open source programming language.

We had a full house for the event.  There were two presenters for the day. Brian Hogan was the first presenter. He is a local web developer, author of "Web Design for Developers: A Programmer's Guide to Design Tools and Techniques", a sponsor of the RailsMentors project, and a pat of Rails Bridge.  The other presenter was Kevin Gisi, student at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, freelance web developer, and Ruby Enthusiast.  Brian and Kevin are the founding members of the EC Ruby group.

The first part of the day involved exploring the Rails framework, which is a great tool that allows for automatic code generation of the most mundane of repetitive tasks in development.  By automating those common tasks, development time is reduced and productivity increases.  We spent that time building a simple cookbook application that allowed us to enter recipes.  The Rails framework allowed us to create a basic, fully functioning application with a database in a matter of hours.  Rails is a really powerful tool.

The second portion of the day was spent learning about Haml, Sass, and several other Ruby extensions, called 'Gems' that can really add to the framework.  Heroku is an example of one of those gems.  Heroku is a free online storage space that is integrated with the rails framework.  With the heroku gem installed, you can easily push your application to the web with a few simple commands.  You can evey see my cookbook by visiting here.  My personal favorite recipe that was entered was "Ice Water".

Ruby Camp was the first event of its kind that has been held at Sitepro.  We certainly hope it's not the last.  Brian Hogan informed us that there were many people that were interested in coming but were unable to attend simply because registration was full.  I'm sure with that kind of interest, that there will inevitably be a second Ruby Camp.

If you are interested in attending a camp like these, you can find plenty of information about code camps in your area by doing a simple web search for "Code Camp" and your region.  Similar events include BarCamp (which is not alcohol related and actually is web related), PodCamp (which surrounds podcasting), WordCamp, Mind Camp, and others.  In the Chippewa Valley region, there's of course Ruby Camp, and also Chippewa Valley Code Camp, Twin Cities Code Camp.  You can find other camps at www.codecamp.org.