crafterm's weblog

redartisan.com is live!

Marcus Crafter — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:15:00 +1000

After many hours of development and fine tuning, the official redartisan.com web site is now live.

This is the site's first release, containing a main page, blog and contact information. Over the coming months I'll be adding new sections and more content.

The past few months have been fantastic, being able to work on many different Rails projects, and with RailsConf Europe approaching I'm looking forward to even more Rails related fun! :)

Now that the Red Artisan site is live, I'll be posting most of my Rails related blog posts there in the future.

Ruby Newbie Night!

Marcus Crafter — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:14:00 +1000

Last night we held a special Ruby/Rails newbie night as part of our usual Melbourne user group meeting. From the attendance and excitement in the room it was a resounding success. We had over 50 people attend from all different backgrounds and disciplines.

The format of the night was made up of two sets of short 5 minute talks to give everyone an overview of Ruby and Rails. The Ruby talks ranged from an intro into the language, runtimes through to more complex topics such as iterators, duck typing and monkey patching. The Rails talks covered all sorts of topics including active record, migrations, partials, layouts, helpers, and even active resource. All the speakers did a great job and it was awesome to see so many varied topics discussed so well.

I gave two talks during the evening on JRuby & Rubinius and Convention over Configuration, and Ryan, John and myself presented Active Record Validations/Associations which was really fun. All the talks were recorded and there were plenty of photos taken during the night which will be available soon.

Feedback from the evening has been really positive, so I'm sure we'll be running a similar night again in the future.

[Update] Screencasts of the talks given are now available.

[Further Update] Photos are also now available.

WebJam!

Marcus Crafter — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:40:00 +1000

Last night Tim and Lachlan held a WebJam as part of the ReMix07 conference here in Melbourne.

The WebJam was run in the Galatica Circus part of the Crown casino complex and was very cool. The idea is simple - 18 presenters, 3 minutes to talk and present something of web related interest to everyone, with audience participants voting via SMS for their favourite demo.

Following the awesome fun at RailsCamp last weekend I presented Guitar Zero in just under 3 minutes including some code, the web site, some stats and a few pictures of people having crazy fun at RailsCamp :)

Was lots of fun. There's a few pictures up at Flickr as well, and it was great to see Tim and Lachlan in Melbourne after a fantastic RailsCamp weekend.

Rails Camp!

Marcus Crafter — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:36:00 +1000

Last weekend about 35 Rails developers from all over Australia came to Camp Chapman in Gosford, an hour north of Sydney for RailsCamp, for a huge weekend of Ruby and Rails hacking, networking, teaching, learning and naturally, partying. The event started Friday afternoon, and went all the way through till Monday, packed full of activities and sessions.

People came from Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Coffs Harbour, Gold Coast, Bryon Bay, Canberra and more, was great to see such a diversity of people from different cities and states.

It's difficult to describe how incredible the atmosphere of the camp was. I think the key was having so many like minded and passionate people together, whom all follow the technology and community surrounding Ruby and Rails so closely.

Since there were only 35 of us there, it had the feel of a real early adopters meeting, with everyone showcasing what they'd recently been working on.

Many of the people I only knew by name and/or blog post before, so it was exciting meeting people you'd "known" for a while but never met personally - reminded me of the first Cocoon GetTogether in Ghent - it was also a blast meeting new people I never knew before who were also as keen about Ruby and Rail as I am.

Tim Lucas set up a server connected to a wireless network for us to use which included subversion, IRC, apache, a full gem repository, mirrors of many popular plugins and few other goodies.

We had no internet access for the entire event, only an internal wireless network - which was actually really great since everyone couldn't blog, twitter, or browse anything other than what we had available collectively. This greatly enhanced conversation and networking between everyone who each had their areas of expertise to share. A few power outages during the day and night helped as well :)

Also, several very cool social applications were written overnight. Both a Pastie and Twitter clone were written by Carl Woodward and Tim Lucas respectively (Pasting and Twatter ). Lachlan Hardy and I also wrote a high scores management application for Guitar Hero called Guitar Zero (yes, Guitar Hero was such a hit), and Nick, Hugh and Huan whipped up a cool jukebox application called Duke using Flex and Rails.

Lachlan and I actually released Guitar Zero during the week on the internet for all to use, check out http://www.guitarzero.com.au/ ! :)

There's many photos of the event available on Flickr as well for all to see.

I'm certainly looking forward to the next RailsCamp! More exciting times ahead! :)

[Update] Jason has just posted a sensational video collecting photos and video from the camp. Brings back many memories - looking forward to the next RailsCamp! :)

Red Artisan!

Marcus Crafter — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:19:00 +1000

Arrived back in Melbourne safe and sound after an awesome trip to the US and Canada for RailsConf US 2007. Thoroughly enjoyed the trip and have many memorable moments.

RailsConf US 2007 was a huge success, the event was massive compared to last years conference, and I found it to be quite well organised, and run with a good mix of speakers and content.

I'll be following this post up with a few summaries of the conference and sessions I particularly enjoyed.

On a personal note, some big news surrounding RailsConf I'd like to announce is that just over a month ago, after 10 years of work with ManageSoft, I decided to create my own company to focus on Rails consulting and freelance work full time. I'm now self employed with my own business, with RailsConf marking the start of this new direction.

The company I've created is called Red Artisan. Red follows the colour, excitement and love of Ruby and Rails, Artisan is defined as a skilled craftsman which matches my passion for building high quality software and also follows my last name Crafter.

Currently the business web site is a splash page while the full site is being developed, but this will be complete within the next week and be live very soon.

I'm really excited about the future of working with Rails, I've already been working with my first few clients and have enjoyed it immensely. If you're looking for Ruby and/or Rails resources, I'd certainly like to hear from you!

RailsConf Underway!

Marcus Crafter — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:58:00 +1000

RailsConf US 2007 Begins!
Originally uploaded by crafterm.

RailsConf US 2007 has just started! There's quite a buzz in the Oregon Convention Center in Portland at the moment while each of the tutorial sessions get underway.

I'm currently sitting in the JavaScipt/Scriptaculous talk that's been given by Thomas Fuchs, the creator of Scriptaculous. In the afternoon I'll be attending Jamis' Capistrano talk which will also be awesome!

More info and photos as they become available :)

RailsConf! Arrived in Portland!

Marcus Crafter — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:16:00 +1000

View of the Convention Center from the Red Lion Hotel Room
Originally uploaded by crafterm.

Just arrived at the Red Lion Hotel in Portland, Oregon for RailsConf US 2007! I'm so excited to be here, it's going to be an awesome event!

Will be heading out to check out the city before we all start meeting up this evening at the DoubleTree hotel bar for pre-conference drinks. Feel free to join us if you're in town.

Tomorrow the tutorial days start and then on Friday the main event begins with all of the sessions, there's quite a few tracks active this year with all kinds of Rails related topics. It's going to be great!

RailsConf Countdown!

Marcus Crafter — Sat, 12 May 2007 03:24:00 +1000

Just a few days to go now!

Tomorrow I depart Melbourne for San Fransisco, and will be in town for a few days before heading up to Portland for RailsConf.

I'm super excited about the trip, so many people from the Ruby and Rails community will be converging on Portland for this event - so many great things will come out of it, it's almost like a Rock concert build up :)

After the conference I'll be heading up to Seattle to meet the local Rails folks up there, and then will travel further up to Vancouver, before heading back to Australia.

I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone at RailsConf - if you're heading up to Portland for RailsConf too, I've got my schedule published at myconfplan, and several of us Aussies/Kiwis have organised a get together on the eve of RailsConf for a few drinks at the DoubleTree hotel - everyone is welcome so feel free to come join in :)

It's been a quiet for weeks on the blogging scene for me, but lots of big news to be announced soon, perfect timing for the RailsConf :)

RCodeTools Presentation!

Marcus Crafter — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 03:12:00 +1000

Last Thursday we had our regular Ruby/Rails user group meeting in the city which went really well.

We had two presentations this time - I presented a talk about RCodeTools, and Cliff presented another one about Information Modelling.

I've just uploaded the slides from my RCodeTools presentation for anyone who is interested in them.

The slides also include the presenter notes so that there's as much context available as possible.

See you all at the next meet!

March Ruby/Rails Meetup!

Marcus Crafter — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:45:07 +1000

It's that time of the month again! The next Ruby/Rails user group meeting will be on tomorrow (29th February) at the usual location:

ThoughtWorks
Level 11, 155 Queen St
Melbourne, Victoria

I'll be giving a talk about about an interesting set of tools I've been playing with recently to do with Ruby code analysis - RCodeTools. There will also be a few talks to do with Information Modelling which should also be great.

See you all there!