That couch was our intro picture at the workshop.
(picture from gizmodo.com)

Monday was the first event at our new upstream office, starring @janl and me presenting an introduction to CouchDB - including a new hands on examples part - and afterwards an overview of what can be done with CouchDB in Ruby so far. The talks were followed by a discussion that gave (hopefully not only) me a couple of new insights I want to share here - after summarizing the evening for the people who couldn’t make it. There will also be a video recording with synchronized slides of both talks be available in the next days (thanks @klimpong).

What is CouchDB

CouchDB ist the new cool kid on the block. It’s a document oriented database that has replication built in, can scale massively and uses an HTTP REST interface to query it. Documents are stored as JSON constructs and can be queried with views that are built using Map-Reduce (a smaller company called google has had a bit of success with that recently). Oh and it’s written in Erlang. Jan has given a number of talks on numerous events already, so there are already a couple of videos and slides available - not from the hands on part though For that you should watch his blog I guess.
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I find it rather hard to choose the right size for text boxes. They are either to small so that you feel like caged in while writing into them or they are so big that you feel lost in that great white emptiness. These times are past since someone came up with auto expanding text areas (e.g. facebook uses them).

For one of our rails apps we use John R. Wulff’s ‘text_area_with_auto_resize‘ plugin. The plugin will give you auto growing text boxes for all text_area calls. I wrote a little extension for prototype’s (1.6.x) in-place editing text area that makes these text areas auto growing as well. So we can have auto growing text areas all over the place.

Am 22.9. 2008 gibt es einen Workshop zu CouchDB mit Jan Lehnardt (CouchDB maintainer) und mir. Nach einer kurzen Einführung wird der Fokus vor allem auf hands on experience liegen, d.h. es wird Beispiele und Code geben. Nach Jans CouchDB-Teil werde ich einen Überblick über die derzeitigen Ruby-Bibliotheken geben und wie damit der schnelle Einstieg zu schaffen ist.

“Leider” sind bereits alle Plätze ausgebucht, da wir nur begrenzt Stühle zur Verfügung haben. Wer trotzdem kommen will trägt sich am besten in die Warteliste ein und begnügt sich dann eventuell mit einem Platz auf dem Boden. Sicherlich wird das nicht der letzte Workshop bei uns sein. Mal sehen was uns demnächst noch so alles einfällt…

If you ever meet a bunch of people sitting with their laptops in front of a tent in the middle of nowhere you might have stumbled across a rails camp. The rails camp is a new unconference where ruby hackers meet to exchange ideas and have fun in an open and inspiring environment. And what could be more open and inspiring when being torn out of your everyday internet/office/city routine by camping. Being cut off from the internet will bring up new approaches and insights to overcome programming challenges as well as bring the members of the ruby community more in touch with each other. Of course it’s also a hell of fun when you’re off from your daily routine with a lot to laugh, drink and play.

That’s why we will attend the rails camp in Denmark to meet our fellow rubyists (eg. from Oslo or the last Euruko) and might code some crazy ideas. The Rails Camp Denmark will likely take place at the end of October - the final date isn’t set yet - 24th October just outside Svendborg on the Danish island of Funen. If you want to join the rails camp you should invest 75 Euro and be prepared for camping over a weekend. More details and discussions can be found in the google group.

Hold your thumbs that the temperatures at the End of October don’t drop below zero so we won’t have to keep our mac books running to heat our tent.