On 22nd July 2010 Mikamai, a web agency based in Milan, hosted a Ruby Social Club Night; an event where nearly 50 people attended watching some speeches about Ruby, Web Development and Startups.
Five presenters talked about their projects and our head developer, Marcello Barnaba presented a set of Rails plugins we spinned off from Panmind and released as Open Source on Github
We released and presented four plugins: an SSL helper similar to Rails’ ssl_requirement but also with named route helpers generation; a Google Analytics ultra-simple plugin, with <noscript> support; a ReCaptcha interface with AJAX validation support and a Zendesk interface for Rails. We released also more and more code on Panmind’s GitHub account, including the framework that implements the boilerplate code behind the ultra-fast AJAX navigation of panmind contents and projects: jquery-ajax-nav.
The other presentations:
Alessandro Falaschi presented Puppet: an Open Source Ruby software aimed at automating repetitive system administration tasks performed into a Data Center. Puppet is greatly extendable because of its modular architecture. Alessandro introduced us with the main Puppet concepts and then presented us typical usage examples with code snippets. Eventually he gave his availability to perform other Puppet keynotes wherever there is interest, contact him for details.
Nicola Junior Vitto presented Blomming: a social marketplace enabling anyone to sell own products on the social networks. He started explaining Blomming’s vision and then went deep into the used technologies: Blomming is built with Ruby on Rails, uses the usual set of plugins all Rails developers use (authlogic, paperclip, …) and uses JSONP to embed the Blomming cart onto other websites. Neat!
Marco Borromeo presented: JSON, Sinatra and Thrift – the talk was thougth on those topics but then has become “Smart Objects Serialization”, because there’s more than one way to do that ™. Serialization is used on web applications to exchange heterogeneus data between different components; when this exchange happens often and with big amounts of data, it coul become a performance problem. Marco then explained usage of different serialization libraries, e.g. thrift (facebook), BSON (MongoDB), protocol buffers (google) and others. Unfortunately his keynote isn’t available.
Stefano Bernardi presented: “The Lean Startup“. An introduction to Hackforward: a specific venture capitalist for developers. HackFwd manages all the logistic and bureaucratic aspects of building up a startup made only by techie people, who are famous for having no interest whatsoever about these aspects – they concentrate on code and protocols instead.
