rails symphonies

Wow, simply amazing. I’d never thought I would ever find people passionate about Ruby. It was a great meetup, and once again went between the hours of 8 to 12:30am. I would have continued longer, but there was some things to the following day.

Seven people attended this meeting. The original three and four others.

One of these are the original three.

Similarly it was a very varied discussion covering about all sorts of things:

• Personal Background
• Haml
• Mash Ups
• Capacity
• State of education in Malaysia
• Venture Capitalists
• Startups
• Lower barriers of entry
• Web 2.0
• The Semantic Web
• The future of Malaysia Ruby Brigade

The last listed topic was what the reason for the meetup. But before we continued Kean asked a very important question. Why do we want to do this? (Or somewhere along those lines)

Once again, each of us have different opinions on why we should push forward for Ruby in Malaysia. Each one, influenced by their personal backgrounds.

• Another avenue for the advancement of Free Culture (I wonder which crazy lunatic proposed this, and what juice was he drinking?)
• Belief that Ruby is a truly great language that everyone can benefit from
• Building local capacity for Ruby
• Monetization

Or somewhere along those lines I forgots, do correct me if I’m wrong.

To me, all of these are valid points. Even the last one. But what’s more important to acknowledge is that we all benefit from each others contributions. We are all a catalyst for one another. I’ve discussed this in another post about FOSS Capacity in Malaysia. Even though our intentions may be different, our passion is still the same. Ruby.

So what were some of the ideas we came up with?

• General presentations ala MyOSS
• Hold Lightning Rounds: Maximum 20 slides in 5 minutes. Resulting in at least 10 presentations within an hour
• Hackathon. Get together a group of people to spend one weekend coding a Rails application
• Ruby/Rails Love (similar to Gnome Love) handholding in helping people contribute to Ruby/Rails)

Discussions will continue through the Malaysia Ruby Brigade mailing list. So if you are interested, but haven’t signed up, do join!

Malaysia Ruby Brigade Trivia: In Bahasa Malaysia (the official language of Malaysia), “Ruby on Rails” translates to “Landasan Delima“

There will be a second meetup tonight 8pm at The Curve Starbucks (at the Street). I know the announcement comes a little bit late, but something better than nothing.

The plan at the moment is to chat and sit around, and figure out how we can get more people to use Ruby in Malaysia. Basically figure out some concrete plans for this little growing group of ours.

One idea was for are a more presentation oriented meetup (ala MyOSS Meetups), with someone presenting on a Ruby related topic. Any ideas guys?

Following this I’ll post up for formal (at least in presentation) invitation (similar to my MyOSS Meetup Announcements) for the Meetups.

Malaysia Ruby Brigade Trivia: Rubyists come from all around Malaysia. A group of “hackers and code junkies in Sabah” calling themselves Phrozz have joined the brigade.

So the Malaysia Ruby Brigade, had our first (informal) meetup. Three people showed up, so it was more like a get together gathering of some of the Ruby enthusiasts in Malaysia. Kegan, Kamal, and myself were the ones present. The gathering took place at The Curve in Starbucks (Borders) before moving to the other Starbucks, as the Borders one was closing shop.

I’ve never met any of these people before…

Before I arrived, Kegan messaged me asking how he would recognize me. I replied “look for the stereotype hacker :)”. As he gave details about his attire, I spotted him immediately and played my role as random bystander purchasing a drink. I guess I make a good actor, or he was unsure if I was the guy he was looking for. After getting my drink, I just introduced myself. Kamal came a short while after.

There was a lot of topics discussed:

• Individual backgrounds
• Google
• Apple
• MacBooks and MacBook Pros
• Textmate
• Frameworks
• Web 2.0
• Opportunities in Malaysia
• Ruby
• Rails
• Agile Development

All between the hours of 8pm to midnight.

It’s cool as these guys are very passionate about what they do. Hope I can get more people joining in next time.

Malaysia Ruby Brigade Trivia: Kamal is now a Rails contributor.