Last Wednesday, Jan 11th we held our fourth meetup. Again, we had a wonderful time getting to know fellow rubyists. There were quite a few new faces, including visitors from Denmark, and new members from Singapore. We love to meet new people, so if you have friends or know anyone who may be interested, please bring them along next time.

As is our custom, we started the meeting with general introductions, then went into our talks for the evening. Here are some notes on the topics presented:

• Introducing http://www.gzruby.org

  The official blog for gzruby. We plan to use the blog to record our meetings and as a landing page for Ruby and Rails in South China. As our organization grows, we hope people continue to find the blog and that makes it easier for them to find the group and come to a meeting. This is the site for our community, so please make suggestions or contribute directly. The source is on github.

  Presented by @adevadeh

• Zero-config local servers - pow http://pow.cx

  This is a great way for developers and testers to run apps locally. Why not use rails server you may ask? Because rather than starting and stopping your app all the time, your pow server will just keep your app running. You don’t need to fuss about with ports, so it’s easy to run multiple apps at the same time. If you are working with any oauth APIs such as the Facebook API, you need a real domain name for your test app; pow gives you a really easy way to set that up. Don’t forget, you should also check out the pow helper gems to make things even easier.

  Presented by HuiMing

• The Joys of seed-fu https://github.com/mbleigh/seed-fu

  Making sure your Rails app has the right data to start things off can get really cumbersome. seed-fu helps make the process a little more streamlined and friendly. You can easily specify objects that need to be created and stored in your DB every time you start your app.

  Presented by Kevin

• The Future of Personal Robotics (slides)

  A very interesting talk indeed. We looked at where cheap robots are today, and what we could do to take them to the next level. We already have cheap robots that can move on their own, react to humans, and perform basic tasks. To expand the abilities of these robots, we could make the brain on the robot more sophisticated and expensive. But why not move the brain to the smartphone? This way we can add complex behaviors that interact with humans and the cloud. Robots from http://arexx.com.cn were demonstrated. Who knows, maybe soon we’ll have a my_robot gem that allows you to write apps to control a domestic helper robot.

  Presented by Chance Jiang

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Thanks very much to our presenters for sharing. We would like to encourage anyone to present at the next meeting. You can talk about anything you find interesting, or something you find useful in your work. By sharing with each other, we learn from each other, and we all become better developers.

See you at the next meeting, scheduled for Wed, March 21, 2012