NOVARug

Or should that be NoVaRug?

Anyone paying attention (or not, as the case may be) may have found my entries a bit sparse, partly because I haven't advanced that far since Rubyconf. I took the next step which was to attend the monthly meeting of NOVARug, or Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group for short.

At first, I thought maybe 10-20 people would show up, but it was probably closer to 30.

The talk was divided into two parts. The first was on agile methodology. A local startup company called RideCharge wanted to adopt agile methodology roughly based on Scrum, with user stories, etc. Although many companies attempt to do this from scratch, reading books, and guessing how they should proceed, this company has apparently done a better job than most.

It goes to show that a lot of the Ruby community has embraced agile methodology. There didn't seem to be any sense that Keith Forsythe, the project manager for the company, felt it was a bad idea, having spent many years in more traditional companies doing more traditional waterfall development.

The second talk was on Liquid, which is apparently a way you can limit what kind of Ruby code you can inject into webpages to prevent people from either maliciously destroying things they shouldn't or by accident.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I went there. The funny thing was that I met a former student, and the guy who gave the Liquid talk (Patrick Joyce) was also a former student. He looked vaguely familiar but the name didn't really ring a bell. He said he was nervous giving the talk in front of a former instructor, but I thought he did a pretty good job.

I pitched a pretty simple idea to them, though I have to wait to see if I can get anything out of it. Like most Rails developers, Patrick and his fellow developer use TextMate on Macs, and wouldn't you know it, I also have both. As mentioned in my rantfest of a previous post, I'm beginning to believe that knowing your editor is pretty important, and so I want to see what these guys have to say about developing in TextMate.

One suggestion they made was to look at RailsCast which I assume is a broadcast of Rails development. Apparently, they tell you what keystrokes they use as they are editing, so you can follow along as well.

I'll have to look into that, and see what I can make of it.

The event, by the way, was held in FGM, which looks pretty snazzy, at least, the parts I saw of it. They had some lolcat poster saying something like "I has no cheezburger", a plea to get people to give to the needy.

It's nice when a software company is able to use geek humor as a way to appeal to its fanbase.