Tonight Jade and I gave a presentation on Alternative Ruby Web Frameworks at the Phoenix Rails Users Group. He kicked us off by showing how easy it was to build an application in Camping. I then followed up by showing off my new favorite framework, Merb. Both frameworks were a hit, and led us into a great conversation afterwards about when you might want to consider using an alternative to Rails.

While I don’t have any slides to upload, I do have a few resources which I found useful. The first of which is Ezra’s slides on writing custom Mongrel Handlers. I had the opportunity to see this presentation at SVRC which is what really turned me on to this framework. He does a great job explaining some of the weaknesses of Rails as well as why the need for Merb exists.

Once you’ve drank the kool-aid you’ll want to check out the development site. Here you’ll be able to keep up with all the latest changes as well as get instructions on how to check-out and build your Merb GEM from source (very important with a framework thats changing as fast as this one). Also, while you’re here be sure to download and check out the Merb sample app, mrblog.

After you’ve installed Merb you’re going to want to walk through Zack Chandler’s excellent tutorial and example app. He does a great job walking you through everything you need to know to hit the ground running.

If you get through all that and still have questions, which you probably will, hop onto #merb on Freenode. The channel is active and the community is quite friendly and willing to help.

Thanks again to everyone who came out to support the local Rails scene. Please join us next month where we’ll be talking about the Joys and Pains of ActiveScaffold!

I’m often asked why I choose to spend my time in Phoenix, as opposed to some place like San Francisco or New York. More often then not its myself asking these questions, as opposed to someone else, and more often then not I’m unable to come up with a good response. I have no real ties to this area to speak of. All of my family, along with the majority of my friends, are two thousand miles away. I’m single, and have thus far been successful at what I do, why wouldn’t I want to surround myself with like minded people in an area better suited for my lifestyle?

When I have these conversations I think back to six months ago. I knew I was due for a change, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do. Luckily I was fortunate enough to have 3 very appealing options in front of me…

• Work as an independent Rails consultant making great money when billing, but always having to worry about the next contract.
• Head to the Bay area and roll the dice with one of hundreds of new technology startups.
• Join on as the lead developer for this little Rails consulting shop whose office was in the upstairs of a candy distribution warehouse.

As an independent consultant I would be limited to small to medium sized projects in which I would spend the majority of my days working alone, or on-site with a client. While the independence appeals to me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend half of my time out pounding pavement looking for that next $5k contract.

The Bay area is intriguing due to the large number of exciting opportunities which present themselves each day. The only problem here is that unless you hit it big relatively quickly, you’re going to go broke trying as it’s a very expensive place to live. Additionally I would be a very small fish in a very big pond.

My final option at the time was to join Integrum, a small Rails consulting company with hopes of doing big things. The moment I met these guys I was excited. They had assembled the beginnings of a great team, and my skills complemented things quite well.

In the end the decision came down to where I felt I could make the most difference. I’m sure I would have done quite well as an independent developer, and equally as well in the Bay area, but when it came down to decision time I couldn’t pass up the opportunity help the local tech community grow while getting in on the ground floor and be able to truly make a difference with this great group of talented individuals.

It has been 6 months now, and our team has doubled in size from 6 to 12. There has obviously been some growing pains (and not the funny Kirk Cameron variety) but we have been very fortunate and have had some great success. Tonight we opened our doors and hosted an open house to take the opportunity to thank our family, friends and everyone in the local tech community who have stood by and encouraged us along the way. We had over 50 people show up, which was a huge surprise! I am very proud to work with a great group of talented people and know now more then ever that I’ve made the right decision.

Both myself personally, as well as Integrum as a whole, are dedicated to helping to grow the local tech community. By hosting this event tonight we’re trying to set an example in which we hope others will follow. The only way we will all continue to grow is if we gather together and congratulate each other on our successes and support each other through our failures. I challenge all of my local peers to follow our example and start thinking about how you can open your doors to try and make a difference in the local tech community.

To all those who came out tonight I sincerely thank you, without your support we would have never made it this far. To everyone who couldn’t make it, don’t worry as this will not be the last one of these events which we host!

I had the opportunity to spend the past weekend exploring the greater Phoenix area with Jake, one of my oldest friends. We were fortunate to be able to spend one last weekend acting crazy prior to him running off and getting married on me this summer.

We stayed pretty busy this weekend driving 200+ miles visiting most of the major cities in the greater Phoenix area.

What follows is a quick recap of the weekend.

Thursday

Jake’s plane arrived around 11:00 p.m. Thursday evening. After a slight confusion about which terminal he was actually at we were cruising down the 202 with the top down. Coming from Spokane where the current temp is 28º with a chance of snow the 65º Phoenix night must have felt like summer.

After a quick stop at Four Peaks to have some of my favorite local beer and admire the Tempe architecture we headed home as I had to work in the morning.

Friday

I spent Friday morning at the office attending various meetings and making sure things were still on track. Many thanks to my wonderful co-workers who were hacking on client-work until well-past 5:00 p.m. while I was out enjoying the afternoon.

Once home again we headed out to Oregenos, one of my local favorites, for a great lunch. We were lucky to find a couple seats at the bar in a surprisingly crowded restaurant. With the wait time at 45 minutes for a table I was left wondering why more people weren’t at work…

After lunch we hopped in the car and headed over to Squaw Peak for a hike. I’ve been here for almost a year now and this was the first time that I’ve really explored the many hiking trails that are within 30 minutes of my house.

As you can see from the photo below Jake is on his way down while I’m still trying to drag my out-of-shape butt up the hill.

After fighting traffic for an hour we made it home where I proceeded to crash while Jake caught up on The Office. I was rudely awoken around 10:00 p.m. with questions of food and something about I-didnt-fly-two-thousand-miles-to-listen-to-you-snore.

With a quick burger from the Yard House in our systems we proceeded to check out the local Scottsdale bar scene. We first checked out E4 which is one of my favorite clubs and usually packed late on a Friday night. Tonight however everyone appeared to be down in Tempe this evening and things were pretty dead. Afterwards we headed over to Mickeys for a bit then headed home.

Saturday

We had a bit of a late start Saturday due to the previous nights festivities. After rolling out of bed around noon, and lounging around for a bit, we decided to head into Tempe to check out the Tempe Music Festival.

While I expected things to be busy, I didn’t realize that there was also an Art Festival going on which closed down half the streets around Mill Avenue causing traffic and parking to be a disaster. Once we finally found a garage, and paid the stupid $10, we roamed around the Art Festival a bit then grabbed lunch and people watched.

After a long lunch we made our way over to the Tempe Beach Park where the music festival was going on. Through a few random occurrences, and some smooth talking, we managed to score VIP press pass which enabled us to watch the festival from a private area directly to the left of the stage which included unlimited pizza, drinks and one of the best seats in the house.

All of the bands we saw were great. While we arrived mid-way through we did manage to see Everclear, Yellowcard, Authority Zero, O.A.R., Lit and The Fray.

Unforunetly my camera doesn’t do so well late at night, so hardly any of my pictures turned out, but here are a few shots from the afternoon.

After the concert ended around midnight we made our way back to Scottsdale, grabbed some late night mexican, and just hung out at the apartment.

Sunday

Have you ever seen that episode of Friends where they get the two recliners and decide that nothing is worth getting up for? Well that is how our Sunday was spent… I have these amazing leather recliners from Lazy Boy which just wrap you up and let you feel like there is nothing worth leaving them for. We thus spent the first half of the day lounging around catching up on The Office until we had to leave for the airport around noon.

Overall we had a great weekend! While I’m sad that Jake is leaving bachlorhood, I wish him and Stephanie the best of luck and look forward to their wedding this summer.

The Phoenix Rails Users Group will be meeting this evening at 6:00pm at the Molly Brannigans in Mesa, AZ.

Agenda:

• 6:00 - 7:00 Social Hour
• 7:00 - 8:00 Introduction to RSpec
• 8:00 - 9:00 Hacking

Hope you can make it!

Last Saturday I helped to organize the first ever Phoenix Bar Camp at UAT in Tempe, AZ. I was a little uneasy going in, and not quite sure what to expect (especially since we didn’t hardly advertise), but we ended up getting close to 40 people to hang out and geek out all day which I thought was pretty damn cool.

For those of you who couldn’t make it Chris and Erica have posted their thoughts on the day. We’ve also got photos up on Flickr.

Many thanks to everyone who came out and made this day possible; especially Sean, Kimbro and James my fellow organizers. A huge thanks as well goes out to all of our sponsors: Integrum Technologies, Microsoft, Grid 7, Jump Box, Neurogami and UAT. Without these guys we’d have been out on the lawn with no projector or pizza!

For you tortured souls who want to play with Growl or Ruby-Growl but are stuck on Windows please check out Snarl and Ruby-Snarl.

I’ll leave the coding example up to you, but at first glance it looks very similar to what I demonstrated last night at the Phoenix Ruby Users Group.

We had another successful Phoenix Ruby Users Group this evening. I believe that we once again had a record turn out, many thanks to all who gave up their evening to come support the community. To be honest I was quite surprised with the number of people who attended, mainly do the the fact that I posted to the mailing list last week stating that I wanted to take a break from focusing on Rails to demo some of the other cool libraries that tend to get overlooked.

The original intent of this month’s meeting was for me to do an in-depth tutorial on Rake followed by a demo from James on automating Trac tasks via Rake tasks. Unfortunetly due to a prior commitment by James, and a sudden lack of interest on my part to talk about Rake for 45 min, plans needed to change. Thankfully this morning Jason convinced me that it would be cool to show off some of the capabilities of RubyCocoa. Thus having never even opened Xcode or InterfaceBuilder I spent my lunch hour doing a little research and was actually quite impressed at what I was able to figure out and hack together (how’s that for being agile!). In the end I decided to stumble through a demo of Ruby-Growl for showing cool little notifications, and RubyCocoa for building a sweet little UI to manage the execution of Rake tasks.

I’ve listed some very brief code-samples below, along with some links to the references that I found most helpful. If you are at all interested in either of these libraries please contact as I’d love to continue hacking on both.

Ruby-Growl

Code:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘ruby-growl’
require ‘open-uri’

growl = Growl.new(“localhost”, “ruby-growl”, [“ruby-growl”])

begin
  URI.parse(“http://joshknowles.com”).open 
rescue 
  growl.notify(“ruby-growl”, “Error”, “joshknowles.com unavailable”) 
end

References:

• http://growl.info
• http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-growl

RubyCocoa

References:

• http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net
• http://www.rubycocoa.com
• http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2004/10/05/cocoa.html
• http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2004/10/12/cocoa.html

Once again thanks to all that attended and showed your support for the local development community. I apologize for my lack of preparation, and appreciate your patience I stumbled my way through my latest pet-project, hopefully you were able to see a thing or two that interests you. For those of you I met the first time, I hope to see you again. For you old timers it’s always a pleasure. I hope to see everyone next Tuesday evening for the AZ on Rails meeting where I will be giving a demo of Capistrano.

One of the main reasons for my decision to re-locate to Phoenix was how well I’ve been embraced in the local development community. In the 3 months I’ve been here I’ve found a great group of talented developers through the Ruby Users Group, Refresh Phoenix and the Desert Code Camp. Many thanks to everyone who has made this a great transition, I look forward to helping to continue to grow the local development community.

Speaking of the Ruby Users Group… tonight was another successful meeting. Today we had 20+ developers show up! Not quite sure what exactly drew everyone in for tonight’s meeting, but whatever it was we were glad to have you there. Many thanks as always to Will and Cyclone Commerce for providing us the great space as well as to James Britt for promoting & facilitating.

Looking forward to next month’s meeting where I plan on presenting more of my plugin work as well as some in-depth Rails testing tutorials and an introduction to Capistrano