HK Ruby & Rails Met-Up on March 31

Sunburn. Aaron had a sunburn from snorkeling in Thailand. I had one too, but could survive if wearing flip-flops. Thus, I was delegated to conduct the Ruby on Rails March Meet-Up. Besides getting a little, I managed to pickup treats and start the meeting only fashionably late.

We heard four quick (20ish minutes) and informative presentations. I’ve said before that I only go to meeting to meet the people because if you know enough about the technology to want to come, you probably know enough that the presentations will be uninformative. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself taking notes.

Dean Missikowski started us off with a solid survey of ActiveRecord. Leon Ho followed with excellent background and tutorial on ActiveResource including the three tweaks needed to adapt standard Rails scaffolding from ActiveRecord to ActiveResource. I gave a tutorial covering some of the best features of ActiveScaffold. Despite the dangers of coding on stage, with the help of the attentive audience, I covered not just the basics but intermediate features like the file_column bridge and helper based field overrides. Daniel Sarosi finished by showing advanced features and customization of ActiveScaffold. You’re just missing out if you Rails app has tabular data and doesn’t use ActiveScaffold.

After the formal presentations, we shared good conversation over the taste treats, a survey of grapes, baby carrots, oat cookies, chocolate wafers, “fun size” candy bars, Pocky, and some “excellent” chocolate chip cookies.