Last week I posted a link about Remote Meetups, but, as it sometimes happens, it didn’t stop there. The basic principle was appealing to me. It’s true that we don’t all live in the Bay area or in New York. Having high quality speakers in meetups is hard when you live in a small city or a remote country. And this is exactly what that initiative tries to address.

So I jumped in and had some talk with Franze. The result is that the GreenRuby meetup we will have this friday will also be remote. Some people will attend physically, some people will come virtually using the Bigmarker platform on the RemoteMeetup account.

Those events usually are based on a format including a presentation followed by interactions. My plan is to go nuts and try a full-social format, with no presentation at all, jumping directly to the interactions. It’s going to be highly experimental and may lead to failure, but it certainly won’t kill any kitten in the process so I think we are safe.

The mix between physical and remote event is the challenging part. We may try the usage of mobile phones to make local people become remote participants (but it seems to be IOs only for now). I will get an iPad ready for easier floating access, that can be fun.

You are welcome to join, either online or irl. I heard Gandi, the physical host and my employer, is going to fill up the fridge with hundred of various beverages and won’t mind us to help reduce that quantity.

While42

This week I got in contact with Sylvain from while42. It’s a social network for french tech engineers, but with a special touch on it. There is no facebook page or google group. They intentionally decided to be irl-first. For people that are most likely to be online all the time, this sounds so therapeutic! So, I decided, with Thomas from Gandi, to setup a Taiwan chapter. If you want to know more (and are french, engineer, and living in Taipei) just drop me a mail.

Traveling ruby

This is a project from the Phusion people, called Traveling ruby. Its purpose is to make it easy to build auto-sustaining tarballs for ruby programms, including ruby binary and all gems in it. That way you can publish a tarball and your customer/user will just launch whatever you put in it. No need to install ruby or any gems.

I gave it a try yesterday on my zabbix-ruby-client gem, and after a few tweaks (mostly because I wanted to use an unpublished version of my gem), it all worked pretty fine. Result is a tarball of 8M. Uploaded to the server (an old squeeze), it just ran the self-contained ruby 2.1.5 with no hassle. It reminded me a bit of the feeling when you upload a go executable on the server. Really neat.

Palm control

There are tiny things that can change a lot. My recent tiny thing is the palm control technique. Every sunday when I prepare Green Ruby I do a huge amount of copy pasting all over the place. Recently I found on a post about keyboard someone talking about the palm control technique for avoiding the copypaste fatigue.

Well, you need to have a keyboard that makes it possible. Mine is a Logitech washable k310. I already liked its look, and even better, it’s perfect for this palm thing because keys are prominent. Use the palm to push control and then it’s only a matter of hitting c or v with the index. Honestly, it changed my life!