• Read more about Ruby Intrigue at Lone Star Ruby Conf

At this year's Lone Star Ruby Conference, Intrideans Brendan, Pradeep, and Adam presented a full-day training, "Ruby Intrigue", in which they walked through the construction of three separate applications: a web crawler, an Asteroids clone, and an SMS server.

Web Crawler Pradeep live-coded four different versions of a web crawler using varying techniques including: single-threaded (crawly), threaded (thready), forking (forky), queuing (queuy), and event machine (eventy). Students followed along asking questions as they went. Once a crawler was complete an open discussion would happen regarding the benefits and drawbacks of the method in question.

Asteroids Clone Adam live-coded a full-blown OpenGL Asteroids clone using Gosu, the 2D gaming library, in just over two hours. Students followed along and successfully built their own versions written on Windows, Linux, and OS X. The clone implemented the player's ship, projectile, asteroids (of different sizes), collision detection, lives, levels, scores, and title/end game screens.

SMS Server Brendan discussed and live-coded different ways to setup a server to send SMS messages using his gem/plugin sms_fu. Though students were able to setup SMS servers, they also received a crash-course in gem publishing as they found a few bugs in sms_fu which resulted in new versions of the gem.

All of the code, labs, and lesson plans are available as open-source and can be found on Intridea's Github account. Adam has also extracted the Asteroids clone into a separate repository to include contributions, updates, and optimizations submitted from the class and can be found here.

As a bonus, the attendees of our class received a custom vintage LSRC shirt, printed on Alternative Apparel shirts and designed by David Potsiadlo. These t-shirts were a huge hit and we'd like to thank A.B. Tees for their quality shirts!

This was the third year in a row that we have had a team of developers teaching a Ruby class at Lone Star. Every year we have a great time connecting with Ruby developers from the local Austin area and beyond. Many thanks to the Lone Star team for organizing this annual conference and all the hard work that goes in to making happen!

• Read more about Intridea at Lonestar Ruby Conference

For the third straight year in a row, senior-level Intrideans will be at the Lonestar Ruby Conference, on Thursday, August 26th, teaching students about Ruby. Students attending the Ruby Intrigue class will work with our Director of Mobile Development, Brendan Lim, our Director of Development, Adam Bair, and our Director of Research and Development, Pradeep Elankumaran.

In a small class setting, students will work on writing a web crawler, an Asteroids clone, and an SMS server. The instructors will also discuss coding practices and methodologies along the way. In keeping with tradition, we have three instructors to ensure a laid-back and collaborative atmosphere. Students will walk away with three different hand-crafted applications, an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment, and a spiffy t-shirt designed by our creative mastermind, David Potsiadlo.

Lonestar Ruby Conference is part of the Lonestar Ruby Foundation, which aims to educate the public about the Ruby Language. The conference, held in Austin, Texas, is in its fourth year and continues to boast a strong lineup of presenters and teachers. This year's lineup includes Blake Mizerany, the creator of Sinatra, Tom Preston-Wernor, co-founder of Github, Gregg Pollack, James Edward Gray II, and many other prominent members of our community.

Registration is still open for the conference and for the Ruby Intrigue class. If you're local to the area, or if you want to spend some time learning about Ruby in the "live music capital of the world", be sure to sign up today!

• Read more about Railsconf Europe 2008 Updates + Lonestar RubyConf

Greetings from still sunny Berlin, where Michael & I wrapped up our Hacking Rails Internals talk yesterday. We would love to hear comments from those who attended — we are actively working on getting the slides and demo code to you as soon as possible. Please rate our session if you did attend, so that we can get some constructive feedback.

Today, Chris & Michael will be presenting Hacking the Mid-End : Unobtrusive Scripting & Advanced UI Techniques in Rails. This 45-minute talk will be a discussion of the “Mid-End” — advanced user interface problems that don’t fit the traditional ‘back-end’ and ‘front-end’ categorization. You can find more details on the RailsConf site.

Chris & I will also be flying out today from Berlin to Austin, TX for the Lonestar RubyConf. Along with Adam Bair, we’re giving a 6-hour mid-level training session on refactoring Rails apps. We will be talking about how to effectively rescue horrid codebases, prevent your codebase from turning into a monster and performance issues — we’re quite excited.

While we’re sad to leave Berlin so quickly — we got the chance to checkout some excellent street food in the city. Next time you’re in Berlin, give yourself a break for one night from expensive restaurants and indulge in Doner Kababs and Bratwurst (usually found with a few blocks of your hotel). Highly recommended. We also saw some yellow watermelon, but that’s not much of a story.

Michael will be here in Berlin till the end of the conference on Thursday — please come say hello if you can at either conference!