#VanRuby Hack Night and Co-Working @ Launch Academy

Yesterday Piotr (Engineering & Co-Founder) was in the city again, enjoying a day of co-working, Ruby hacking and wall-to-wall sunshine.

Piotr spent the day co-working at Launch Academy as they were also playing host to the bi-monthly #VanRuby meetup, Ruby Hack Night.

Ruby Hack Night @ Launch Academy

#VanRuby Logo

#VanRuby Hack Nights are back, and are now being held on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month. The Ruby Hack nights have a very different focus to the #VanRuby Social Lightning Talk event we were at last week. For this meetup everyone turns up with their own laptop and spends the night communally hacking away at their favourite open-source project. It’s essentially a bunch of developers jamming together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other if they get stuck on a problem. In #VanRuby’s words, “we all get together and hack on cool stuff!”

Piotr was working on a project to help get more visibility during a deployment process. If this is the kind of project you’re interested, you can check it out here, on GitHub.

Who are Launch Academy?

Launch Academy categorizes itself as a hybrid incubator, accelerator and alternative education centre. As well as housing 70 startups and 120 entrepreneurs they share their space with companies like Microsoft and GrowLab.

Here’s a quick video about their services, it’s not hard to see why they’re so successful!

 

The next #VanRuby Hack Night is on June 18th at Launch Academy, will we see you there? Leave a comment below if you plan to attend, it would be good to meet you.

#VanRuby Meetup @ Medeo

meetup logo

Last Thursday three of our dev team went to the May edition of the #VanRuby meetups, in Vancouver.

The #VanRuby meetups are a great way for us to stay in touch with our local developer community. Once a month #VanRuby organizes a meetup at a different location and either co-ordinates guest speakers or, in the case of May’s meetup, encourages participation from attendees.

Our favorite #VanRuby social lightning talk

This month’s theme invited speakers to give a summary of their favorite RailsConf talks. We were really impressed by Loki Meyburg’s recap of ‘Rails Insecure Defaults’ because Rails is considered to be one of the most secure web application frameworks available; however, this talk showed us that when you dig a little deeper it’s easy to find situations where Rails in built behavior could be more secure. A great example here, from Florent:

“when you launch a Rails application it has to be launched on a specific IP, so it can be accessed it in your browser. But if you use an IP like 0.0.0.0, it means that other people can also access it if they want to, from their browser”

We also attended RailsConf back in April, so Piotr and Suman both offered to share their insights with the Ruby community.

Piotr ended up giving two talks, a ‘micro-talk’ (as he put it) on strong parameters and a full lightning talk on API testing.

Suman’s lightning talk was a recap of Sandi Metz RailsConf talk ‘The Magic Tricks of Testing’ and suggested that developers are writing too many tests and testing the wrong kinds of things. Sandi’s original RailsConf talk ‘The Magic Tricks of Testing’ is available on SpeakerDeck.

#VanRuby talk by Piotr

Lightning Talks are 2-10 minute talks where speakers show a short slide presentation or code in a repl.

The #VanRuby meetup location

This month the meetup was hosted at Medeo, a Vancouver-based telehealth utility that makes it possible for patients to connect with their doctors via their computer, phone or tablet. We were fascinated by what was being achieved at Medeo, they’re reinventing the house-call and making healthcare easier and more convenient for everyone. It was a pleasure to be hosted by them.

Modeo devices

Modeo is free to download from the Apps store

Did you attend the recent #VanRuby meetup, too? Please leave a comment and let us know which talks you enjoyed.