Montreal RB meetup

As a way of welcoming in the new year of 2014 and trying to decide which way was up from down, left from right, I made a decision to be a speaker at the local Montréal Ruby group. Having attended a dozen or more meetings over the years I felt like I had 20 minutes of quality material without being too technical, or wildly off of one topic.

I chose to do a talk built around a Ruby Toolbox. What are you carrying around in your toolbox to help with the day to day work of writing scripts that quickly address and solve common issues. I chose to talk about delayed jobs that can be run in the background of some other work. This is ideal for API work when latency and speedy responses might be necessary. A lot of issues require scheduling and recur often, so I included some code that provides for an easy way to resolve these issues. I felt like I was managing the time allotted without stumbling too much so I included a few brief examples of how I use the gems in my toolbox.

The wrap up and questions after were not difficult to field and answer (thankfully) so the take away was that I want to do this kind of presentation again. I also learned that as a speaker I can never rely on the hardware at the venue. In this case, the Notman house was providing a VGA compatible projector but my Mac Book has only a Thunderbolt display output. The other speaker was tied to Windows with a Toshiba so he had no trouble with VGA output but I was stuck without the dongle. In a pinch I tried deploying my slideshow to Heroku so it was available online and hence I could just borrow his machine as a surrogate and click the arrow keys on his machine. I came close but no cigar. My slideshow was using revealJS with grunt and nodeJS as requirements. My first ever push of a nodeJS project to Heroku, during the other presentation was failing. I knew I was under some pressure, but this was ridiculous! Some vague JS error was holding me back from glory! Turned out to just be a simple matter of deploying the right version of Express. A kind enthusiast at the meetup volunteered to run home and pickup his dongle for me, so all was well. With that I was able to present without issue.

The slideshow is on Heroku.