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Rumblers from Montreal, assemble!

Looks like we’ll have at least 2 teams to compete in the RailsRumble this year!

On a Friday evening (for most of us), you sit at your computer, with up to three of your closest friends nearby, when suddenly your Twitter stream starts flooding! Your IRC windows start flashing by! Your friends start clicking rapidly on their own machines! “It’s up!” one of them yells.
You have forty-eight hours, up to three friends, a shared Git repository, a remote server, and Rails (or your favorite Rack-based framework). From that point on, it’s up to you – to design, develop, and deploy the greatest web application the world has ever seen!

The 2010 RailsRumble will be held from October 16th, 00:00:00 UTC until October 18th, 23:59:59 UTC (which is Friday October 15th, 8 PM until Sunday 8 PM for us).

If you’re interested, leave a comment below and join the #montreal.rb IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Depending on how many participants there are, Bloom Digital Platforms might be able to lend their offices.

I hope to see many Montreal teams this year!

Summer Recess: See you in September!

The whole group is taking a recess. That doesn’t mean we won’t see each other informally over the summer. Just be sure to follow @montrealrb to know about gatherings.

Our next formal event will be on September 21st. Details will be coming around late August. Be sure to check back then.

Until then, have a great summer!

Montreal.rb June 15th recap

Great crowd yesterday at Montreal.rb. I’d like to thank all speakers for the 2009-2010 season:

On a related note, Drew Sechrist mentioned he was looking to build a team of engineers for his new startup, kuuzuu. Drew said he might be interested in building and hosting his team in Montreal. Show him all the talent we’ve got!

Next Montreal.rb: June 15th

Morgan Tocker prepared a talk on “How NoSQL is different from MySQL (InnoDB)”:

It’s good to understand some of the basic internals to how InnoDB
works, what goals it has, and what trade-offs you may be making when
you switch to a NoSQL database.

Paul Mylchreest  has a gem he kept under the radar: hansel. Hansel is a gem to drive httperf.

As usual, we’ll be at 481 Viger W., at 6:30 PM on June 15th, 2010. Free admission for all. Thanks to Bloom Digital Platforms for the venue.

Looking for new presenters

If you’ve come before, you know we’re a cool bunch and we don’t bite anyone. If you’ve never presented before but would like to do so, do get in touch with me: francois@teksol.info. There are a variety of topics you could present on:

Any of those topics is a candidate for a talk. You don’t have to talk long either: 5-10 minutes to give us an overview of some technology.

If you’re interested, talk to me!

How to upgrade to Rails 3 by Jonathan Palardy

It is official! Jonathan Palardy will show us how to upgrade your existing Rails 2.3 applications to Rails 3. And since moving to Rails 3 entails using Bundler, I, François Beausoleil, will present Bundler first.

Our meetup will be on May 18th, 2010, at 6:30 PM at 481 Viger W, in Montreal’s downtown.

Next Montreal.rb: May 18th, 2010

Back to technical matters this month!

We’ll be talking Bundler and Rails 3. François Beausoleil (me!) will present Bundler, how to use it now, what problems it solves, and I’m still waiting for a confirmation on a Rails 3 presenter.

As usual, we’ll be at 481 Viger W., at 6:30 PM on May 18th. Free admission for all. Thanks to Bloom Digital Platforms for the venue.

Montreal.rb Hacknight: May 4th, 2010

I’m pleased to announce the 3rd Montreal.rb Hacknight. Please bring your laptops and questions: we’re talking and building something with callcc, or continuations. We’ll probably dissect Wee, a Ruby Rack-compliant continuations based web server.

I hope to see you at 6:30 PM on May 4th, at Bloom’s offices, at 481 Viger W, Montreal.

Montreal.rb business edition 2: April 20th, 6:30 PM

It’s that time of month again! Get your gear ready, we’re having another business edition.

First up, we’ll have a flash talk by Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer from Montreal Start Up. Jean-Sébastien will talk about FounderFuel Ventures, their new seed fund.

JS Cournoyer has been in high technology since the mid nineties both as an entrepreneur and an investor. JS is a partner with Montreal Start Up, an active angel investor and co-founder of a few startups including Maybenow and SocialBuckets. He was previously an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Vantage Point Venture Partners (VPVP), a diversified technology venture capital fund based in San Bruno and was angel investor, CFO and VP business development with Terrascale Technologies, a storage software company sold to Rackable systems in 2006.

Next, Guillaume Bouchard from NVI will talk about doing a good search and social campaign.

Guillaume Bouchard est co-fondateur et président de NVI, une entreprise montréalaise spécialisée en stratégie interactive. Fondée en 2004, NVI est rapidement devenue la plus grande agence web spécialisée en SEO et médias sociaux au Canada, avec plus de 50 employés.

Finally, Gary Haran from Talkerapp will tell us about “4 Ways to Boot Your Startup”.

Gary Haran is an entrepreneur who co-founded talkerapp.com and now works as Chief Information Officer at SocialGrapes.com.  In this flash talk he plans to convince you that it’s time to boot your own startup. If you are ready to take the leap he’ll show you 4 good ways to do so.

As usual, we are having the event at 481 Viger St W. Thanks to Bloom Digital Platforms Inc. for allowing us the use of their premises.

Next Hacknight Event: April 6th, 2010

Our last hacknight occured nearly a month ago. We were 6 and we hacked on Holygrail. Lots of coding and workarounds later, we managed to make Holygrail call into Rails integration tests for Ajax requests. Martin still hasn’t announced a new release, but he told me it was forthcoming.

Anyway, our next event will be on April 6th, 2010, 6:30 PM as usual. Please bring your laptop and mind. We can go out or call for food as appropriate. I don’t have any gems yet, but we still have 2 contenders from last time around:

  1. Package @chebuctonian’s semantic_menu as a gem
  2. Make @aan4nd’s Deadweight reuse credentials across requests

I’m open for suggestions as well. Leave your suggestions below. I’ll create and put up a survey shortly.