I’m consulting here in Winnipeg, Canada for a very cool dot.com. Teaching these developers Ruby on Rails is just too fun. They are Web Developers, mainly having used PHP, and like every great development shop, they’ve rolled their own tools for doing database access, managing the database (migrations), templating, deployment, etc. After teaching them the basics of Ruby on Rails and all these things that are built right in, they’re in love. I can’t wait to show them the built-in AJAX, testing, RESTful web-services, deployment, and all the other ruby-love and rails-goodness that I’ve come to love myself.

I certainly remember the day I fell in love with Ruby on Rails. Sigh.

If you’re a web developer doing web-stuff and you haven’t taken a look at Ruby on Rails, you’re missing out. Even learning a new framework (and language like Ruby) will expand your repertoire in your current language/framework of choice.

Did I mention I’m available for hire for consulting/training/project-kick-offs/development?

Some shameless self-promotion is going on at my favorite techno-babbling blog, CleanAir.

It’s our Top 10 Highgroove Moments of 2006. Enjoy!

I’m back from the Annual RubyConf, held this year in Denver Colorado.  I had a blast.  It was nice to put a lot of faces to names (e-mails).

The talks were wide-ranging from “The History of Ruby” to “YARV Compliation” and all over the place in their scope and topics, from hard-core techno-babble to pontification on how open-source principles might apply to a free-spirited consulting company.

One of the speakers couldn’t make it, so RubyCentral opted to use the 45 minutes to do 9 five-minute “Lightning Talks.”  Derek and I signed up and presented the newest incarnation of Heartbeat, which demoed the live setup of an application for push-button deployment over the web using Capistrano.  We got a lot of great feedback, and some of the other lightning talks were amazing.

Overall, the conference had a great sense of comradarie around this thing we know and love called Ruby.  I can’t help but think that’s what it must have felt like during the first few Java conferences.  I can’t speculate on the exact nature of where Ruby’s going, but with “official” support to the Ruby Community and presentations from respective members of the Sun, Microsoft, and Apple camps, things are looking good.

I’m giving a talk tonight at the Atlanta Ruby User Group meeting on [Rails] Deployment with Capistrano.

I have some slides, but will be demoing it on a simple app (that does nothing).  Despite my antics, Capistrano is a Big Boy Tool, and to its credit, is simple and effective.

Here are the slides, so if you’re coming tonight, no peeking!

Capistrano - Atlanta Ruby User Group Presentation.pdf

I am super excited about my newest gig, as an Instructor at the Big Nerd Ranch here in Atlanta.  I’ll be teaching a course on Ruby on Rails, a web development framework (and an opinionated development style) that is very near and dear to me.

I was looking back at my previous blog posts on how much I enjoyed teaching and instructing, and it’s clear that I am passionate about sharing knowledge and helping others — and enjoy the challenges of explaining complex concepts in simple, easy-to-understand ways.

The Big Nerd Ranch style of a retreat with intensive, hands-on training has to be the best environment to learn that I’ve come across.  As a former corporate instructor, having taught enterprise-grade software products at large Fortune-x00 companies, I know from experience that there are about a billion distractions to “students” on-site (e-mail, meetings, support, phone calls, etc.) that detract from the learning experience, and in some cases can disrupt the entire learning process.  I’m excited to be a part of a great team and concept.

p.s. we blogged it on CleanAir.

Derek and I have been working on a little something called Heartbeat that is going to revolutionize Ruby on Rails deployment and administration.

It was born out of our RailsDay2006 competition entry, and soon it launches.  Derek and I posted a sneak peak of Heartbeat Deployment on the Highgroove blog.

That Derek is getting unbelievably good at Ruby on Rails developing. His AJAXian hacking skills are a force to be reckoned with.

Stay tuned!

Derek and I competed (and sponsored) the Rails Day 2006 competition.

We successfully built and deployed an application we call Heartbeat in 24 hours.

Yes, you heard that right, 24 hours. We started at midnight on June 16, and ended at 11:59 pm. We got a little bit of sleep, and yes, my butt still hurts from sitting at the computer all day, but we built an amazing application.

Here are some screen shots:

And here are some stats (and our commit log — notice how my commit comments are crazy, and got crazier the closer to finishing and yet Derek’s are always nice and concise):

http://spectate.railsday2006.com/changesets/teams/107/

Rails Day 2006 was a blast, and we look forward to sponsoring and competing in the years to come!

As many of you know, I’ve been deploying quite a few Ruby on Rails apps lately — to shamelessly plug a few, there’s Meople (a db/app server and web server setup), some personal sites (my own server) and quite a few Highgroove Studios client’s sites.

When I first started “helping” Derek Haynes of Highgroove Studios a long time ago to deploy Rails applications, we were learning along with the big providers. We survived the pre-1.0 Rails days (0.13, 0.14 !) and some crazy Apache and lighttpd setups. We’ve come a long way, from the days of shared hosting and the wonderful resources at TextDrive, DreamHost, and other hosting providers. We’ve since moved on to deploying on our own servers, dedicated and co-located for complete control. Along the way we’ve contributed to many guides, pages, and the community — most importantly, many of the pages on the Official Ruby on Rails wiki. Most notably, we’ve learned a few tricks or two about hosting business-class apps that demand serious attention to detail.

We’re ready to give back to the community, and provide a much needed service. We’d like to introduce Slingshot Hosting - specialized Ruby on Rails Business Hosting for Serious Applications. (more…)