There’s nothing quite like gathering 30-40 programmers at a bar and giving them all a few drinks. This took place last Tuesday night at Old City’s National Mechanics where Philly.rb, Philadelphia’s very own Ruby user group, gather to discuss all things tech. There were 3 talks, 1 lightning and 2 standard presentations.

The first talk was an introduction to VIM. For those who may not be familiar with this, it is a popular text editor that was written 21 years ago. Now for users such as myself, I have always been more comfortable in text editors such as SublimeText, TextMate or BBEdit. It emphasized the importance of how to recover files on windows acting quickly and not overwriting any data on the drive. VIM is an entirely different ballgame. It uses commands as your primary way of editing text. Where you would traditionally bring your cursor to the start of a sentence, highlight maybe 5 lines and hit ‘Delete’, in VIM you would first make sure you are in ‘normal mode’, then issue the following key commands: d4$ , or delete 4 lines($ = lines??). But then as more and more commands began to be done, the speed at which the presenter was able to modify code showed obvious efficiency improvements to other editors. Now it’s just time for me to learn another 300 shortcuts and find somewhere for my brain to retain them. Learn more about VIM by either opening your Terminal application and entering ‘vimtutor’ or through this very interesting site http://vim-adventures.com.

The second talk was titled “Beverage Driven Development” given by Brian Auton (@brianauton) and focused on using Mocha, Chai, and Konacha as tools to test your javascript in a Rails application. TDD (or test driven development) has become a standard among developers in where tests are written for your code in order to make sure it works. This way when you begin to implement new features down the road, you can rerun your earlier tests to make sure all your code still works. This testing has often revolved primarily around testing your server-side code and actions to make sure that it was functioning properly, but never really your client-side javascript. Throughout the presentation, Brian went over examples of how to write tests so that not only can you continuously test your server-side code, but also your client-side code.

And the final talk was given by Jason Garber(@jasongarber) and was titled “Chef for people who aren’t named Mat”. While the joke of the title may be lost by most (Mat Schaffer was the original head of Philly.rb and an avid chef user), the lecture was very informative. Many Ruby/Rails developers are used to creating servers by hand or using Platform as a Service providers such as Heroku where server administration is taken care of for you. Chef is a tool that allows a developer to create a set of instructions to be sent to a server to be executed. These instructions can then be used to install packages, create users, make folders, or configure files in order to make the whole server provisioning process much more automated. It works so well that you are able to reuse the same set of instructions to set up as many servers as you’d like, over and over, with the same results every time. However, this technique can often be overwhelming when approached by some developers. Jason’s lecture gave a great overview of how to get started from a practical application of the tools. He has a sample project that he has been working on that can be found here and also suggested visiting learnchef.com.

For those of you out there and interested in Ruby, or even any other language, I would strongly recommend coming out to the next Phily.rb meetup. It’s a great time!