Accra.rb meeting: 2008.03.15

We just finished our bi-weekly meeting. Only three people were present: Henry, Selasie and I.

We started off with a short presentation by Henry called “Ruby on Rails Quick-Start”. He took us through how to set up rails and showed us how to create a very simple web app. It was quite interesting. I haven’t really played around all that much with rails.

Then we discussed other Ruby news and events. Selasie mentioned that he had discovered Gruff, a graphing package for Ruby. Will take a look at it.

I talked a bit about my experimentation with JRuby. I wish I could have brought up Rubinius as well, but the truth is I’ve been really short on time of late, and as a consequence haven’t had enough time to play with Rubinius. Will have to make sure I find some time again, even if it means losing out on some of that sleep that I seem to be indulging in every single night. 😉

Our meetings are short and not all that well organized. Attendance is also bad. It’s difficult to do real presentations without a projector. But, all that doesn’t really matter, as long as we meet regularly. We all have to sit down and think about how we think the meetings should be structured in order to be interesting. With time we’ll get there.

First Accra.rb meeting

Today the Accra Ruby Users Group (Accra.rb) had our first meeting. It was a really short get-together, a chance for the members to get to know each other. We discussed what should be the group’s focus.

We decided that for the time being we will meet bi-weekly, on Saturdays. We will discuss Ruby events and happenings. We will also have presentations by group members. Henry would give an introduction to getting up and running with rails. I will do a presentation on Rubygame and another one on JRuby.

We also decided to focus some attention on our wiki. For the last few weeks I’ve been writing content for a wiki that I hope we’ll be able to put online eventually. It contains tutorials, sample code, a reference section and a few other things. We are using MediaWiki since the intended host only supports PHP.

Accra Ruby Users’ Group

Are you are Ruby programmer, or at least interested in Ruby programming? If you are, why not join the Accra.rb Google group? We have just set the group up so there hasn’t been all that much activity yet.

If you are located in Accra as well, get in touch! We’d like to try to organize some Ruby meet-ups from time to time. Of course, you are welcome to join in even if your not in Accra, but you’ll have to be able to get here first! 😉