Under the Hat

It’s that time of year again: the sky is blue, the grass is growing, and the air is fragrant with the smell of flowers. The kind of days that leaves most people feelings happy and energized.

Okay, not entirely true at the moment but it is that time of year, March 6, when Barcamp Antwerp takes place. Always a good day to be had; discussions, presentations, new ideas and coffee.

Since a barcamp isn’t necessarily about anything the coffee better be good. So we’ve taken the liberty to do just that, enjoy and see you there !

Note:

Hi ! I‘m new here, after reading this I signed up for the job and am looking forward to “help us develop the most awesome applications”.

Not so long ago we decided to find someone to help us develop the most awesome applications.

I’m happy to announce that as of this morning Piet is joining us. After today’s great start, there is no doubt in my mind we made a good choice.

So, starting today, there’s 3 of us!

If you’re a developer like me, you probably spend a whole lot of time in your Terminal window. We all love the power that comes with the shell, but we can get frustrated because it doesn’t work quite the way we want it to.

That’s why Robby created oh-my-zsh. This is a collection of extensions to zsh, which is a replacement for the default bash on your Mac.

It does a whole slew of nifty things. Case-insensitive auto-complete is one of them. Autocompletion of paths at the remote end of your scp command is another one. But the reason I really love oh-my-zsh is this:

That’s right. Because I suck at typing.

For the third time, the Belgian Ruby community is organising a one-day developer’s room with presentations on Ruby and Rails at FOSDEM (6 Feb 2010, Brussels).

FOSDEM is one of Europe’s biggest conventions of people working on Open Source Software. This is a great opportunity to meet the brighest minds in the OSS world!

We’re looking for people who want to share their passion about Ruby or Rails.

You can submit your proposal until until Monday, January 4, 2010. For more details, have a look at the call for papers

Even if you’re not presenting, we love to meet you there!

A couple of weeks ago I watched the RailsCast on Searchlogic and saw Ryan use some gem called Hirb. It looked interesting for sure, so I wrote it down to check it out to completely forget about it.

Until yesterday.

What is Hirb?

A mini view framework for console/irb that’s easy to use, even while under its influence. Console goodies include a no-wrap table, auto-pager, tree and menu.

OK. What does that mean?

It improves irb’s default output a lot. And by a lot, I mean, A. LOT.

In case you like it, you might want to set it up to autoload in script/console for all your Rails projects. In order to do so, add the following to your ~/.irbrc file:

if ENV['RAILS_ENV']
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'hirb'
  Hirb.enable
end

Resources

• Searchlogic RailsCast
• Hirb
• Hirb - irb on the good stuff
• Hirb tips for rails