April 5th, 2010, by Adam
At The Frontier Group, we have been hosting the Perth Ruby on Rails Meetup since August 2009. This meetup has brought together many individuals and businesses from the Perth Ruby on Rails community each month and has had great success in helping distribute knowledge through interesting presentations, as well as connecting developers to project work. It’s also a great social event if you’re even remotely interested in hearing about Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
After a few discussions with the Brisbane Agile Academy, we’ve decided to start a second meetup group. Our organisation has a strong focus on Agile methodologies and we’re really interested in sharing and developing this knowledge with the local community. You don’t even have to be a developer for this one! Agile techniques appeal to a range of professionals, companies and roles. If you’re interested we’re looking to run our first session in a few months time, once we’ve generated some noise.
Dwayne Read from Strategic Systems is the co-organiser for this group, an Agile coach with over 15 years applied Agile development experience (20 years software development experience). He will also facilitate our first meetup with the following interactive session:
Come to the inaugural Perth Agile Meetup to participate in an Agile ‘Release Planning’ session and two ‘Sprints’. You are the Customer/Product Owner (or one of anyway) and the project objective is to ‘discuss the agile techniques of interest’. We will run a JAD session to list the techniques/features, prioritise and then discuss/exemplify two Sprints worth (albeit timeboxed to 1 hr in total – now there’s a tight delivery schedule!).
Show your interest by signing up (for free) at the official Meetup page, and when the first date is announced, you’ll be notified and can RSVP. Head there now!
Of course you can always follow us on Twitter to find out any updates.
Want to learn more about Agile? Check out the Agile Academy website.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Inside TFG, Lifestyle | 2 Comments »
March 26th, 2010, by Adam
Today, The Frontier Group are proud sponsors of the Ruby Summer of Code.
“To continue Google’s great tradition of sponsoring Open Source Development via summer student interns, several Ruby companies, organizations and community members are getting together to fund Ruby Summer of Code. The project will work much the same way Google Summer of Code does — mentors and student interns, with mentors voting on which student projects get slots. Students will be paid a stipend of $5000, and we’ll raise the number of student slots as contributions come in.” – Ruby Summer of Code
Frequently Asked Questions
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What is Ruby Summer of Code?
Ruby Summer of Code is a student internship program, modeled after Google’s Summer of Code, designed to help fund student development of Ruby coding projects in Summer 2010.
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What are the goals of this program?
The goals of the program are to help get students engaged in Ruby development and the Ruby community, and to continue the tradition of great student Ruby projects completed in past summers as part of GSoC.
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How many mentoring organizations and students are expected to take part in the program?
The number of mentoring organizations depends on the number of sponsors the program receives; all funding will go towards adding more mentors and students to the program. If you or your company would be interested in helping out, contact us.
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When can I apply?
The mentor application window is March 24th to April 2nd. The student application window is April 5th to April 23rd.
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How does the program work?
The Ruby Summer of Code program is designed to help fund student development of Ruby and/or Rails projects in the summer of 2010. Accepted students will be matched up with accepted mentors and will have two months to complete their summer projects. Students will undergo a project evaluation midway through the summer (dates to be announced), and those showing suitable progress will receive 50% of their student stipend. At the close of the work window, projects will undergo final evaluations, and students who successfully completed their projects will receive the remaining 50% of their stipend.
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How do evaluations work?
Projects will be evaluated by each student’s mentor, and then reviewed by the larger mentor pool. Evaluations will be individually tailored based on the pre-determined agreed upon objectives and deliverables of each project.
More information can be found at the Ruby Summer of Code website.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Inside TFG, Ruby on Rails | 2 Comments »
February 2nd, 2010, by Aaron
Every third Thursday of the month we have a Ruby on Rails meetup at our offices. It’s a bit of a mix of some socialising and some tech sharing. A few of the guys share the same woes in trying to run a small business, or deal with clients, or implement some particular solution so it can sometimes end up being quite a mixing pot for solution finding and solution sharing.
I think in the year 2009 we’ve seen the group grow from a meeting of somewhere around 4-8 people each month to sometimes around 30. In December to celebrate a successful year of growth in the Perth Ruby community we went on a pub crawl down Barrack and Beaufort St, everyone seemed to have a lot of fun and it was good to take the show on the road. Generally we keep the drinking and tomfoolery inside the bounds of our office.
You can find out some more information at the meetup site but generally we get between 15 to 30 people attending and there will be talks ranging from using Capistrano for PHP deployments to Behaviour Driven Testing and a lot in between. In January we had talks on using Sinatra to setup some simple Javascript unit testing, using Sinatra and Rake to setup a simple management interface, and using Soap4R to interface with SOAP APIs.
The meetup is held in Unit 9, 1010 Wellington St from 5pm onwards. Beers and snack food are provided, you just need to bring yourself and a willingness to exchange ideas! The next meeting will be on February 18, 2010.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Tags: ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Meetup, Social
Posted in Inside TFG | No Comments »
February 2nd, 2010, by Adam
Lately I have been left feeling slightly bemused, possibly even despondent. What about you may ask? The reaction this week to the iPad for one.
The instant it was announced, the concept of jumping on the nearest spaceship and leaving this planet behind was not far from my mind. I mean, who doesn’t love a good argument on the Internet right? But the sheer magnitude of negativity and lack of foresight was astounding. I guess there was a lot of disappointed people who expected the iPad to be something that it was never intended to be, but are we really living in an “all about me” society? More importantly, is that where we want to be?
I would never expect everyone to like such a device and nearly everyone I talk to that doesn’t use an Apple product, hates Apple products. I used to be one of those people too. I grew up with MS-DOS, Windows 2, 3, 95, 98, 2000, XP, then shifted to Linux for the next few years. Maybe a solid Apple product came along at the right time for me, just as all the other competitors were struggling. They’ve since moved on and regained their following again, but I’ll most likely continue down the path which has seen me the most productive in business and life.
But back to my original point. I spent 10 minutes thinking about potential uses for the iPad that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere, and it wasn’t hard to come up with some amazing out of the box solutions. I contemplated writing a post, to join the other millions of bloggers out there but I held back for a while. Eventually Venessa Miemis wrote exactly what I was thinking, but she’s done the hard work citing resources and everything!
If you have a spare ten minutes it’s definitely worth a read, regardless of how you feel about the device. It may turn out to be a game-changer or it may disappear into insignificance 12 months after it launches. But if like me, people want to read some objectivity on a topic, then this is for you.
iPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking?
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Lifestyle | No Comments »
January 28th, 2010, by Adam
Over the last month we have been in negotiations with Engine Yard to join their Partner Network. Today we are proud to announce that we have been accepted into the program and have become Engine Yard’s first Australian Partner. The partnership is a mutually beneficial arrangement that enables us to work together on projects that require the backing of a premier scalable Ruby on Rails hosting company.
We look forward to working with Engine Yard and are excited at the opportunities it will bring in 2010.
Oh, and we get to display a sexy badge :)
From prnewswire:
With the dramatic increase in the number of Ruby on Rails development firms, Engine Yard has launched the Engine Yard Partner Network to connect customers to a full range of application services for Ruby on Rails including design, development, deployment, and maintenance. Choosing an Engine Yard Partner with Engine Yard products and services helps deliver a highly available, scalable, secure application and a seamless end-to-end experience.
“The ecosystem of application development firms using Ruby on Rails is snowballing as more and more firms discover they can get more done in less time by switching to Rails,” said Marcy Campbell, VP of Sales and Business Development of Engine Yard. “We’re excited to offer our partners a complete, reliable platform for their Rails applications during and after development.”
Partner Network developers create applications using Ruby on Rails because they can deliver better applications faster and with higher quality. They rely on Engine Yard to provide the best platform, technologies, and services to deploy and manage applications in the cloud.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Inside TFG | No Comments »
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