Dave Verwer

Dave gave us a wonderful overview of Ruby on Rails, showing us how he uses Rails, the knowledge he's gained from using Rails and other useful information. There was a potential disaster surfacing as we watched him delete his 'here's one I made earlier' Rails project, but he recovered like a true pro and had enough time to talk us through what he'd recovered. It was worth the wait. No matter how well you know a language/framework it never hurts to see someone else's take on it. Better still when they show you how they use it on a real life, live project.

Carl Drinkwater

Carl talked in detail about the Ruby language's syntax and structure. I really enjoyed his comparison of different languages and their syntax. I learnt quite a bit from Carl, especially during his discussion of Ruby's ability to behave as a strongly typed language for declared variables.

 Rob Lee

Rob's talk was all about AJAX and Rails and some of the more abstracted JavaScript-generating Rails classes. He'd put together a quick demo page (in 1 day!), designed to aggregate all the content that we'd been posting about the GeekUp throughout the day. 

Dave Verwer

This time Dave gave us a terrifying look into deploying RoR applications. Enough to put anyone off I think! He did a few very useful demos where I picked up some great tips I'll certainly remember to use when deploying RoR apps.

Phil Winstanley

Phil's talk was very unexpected and had me gripped from the beginning :)
Phil is a .net developer who chose to use Ruby to build test classes (using WATIR) to test his asp.net web applications. WATIR seems very useful and the idea of using it for asp.net app testing is a great one.

BackChannel

We tried out Campfire for the BackChannel and I think it worked out pretty well. Although apart from inline images and file uploading, we could have just been on IRC.

Transcripts here: http://mattbrindley.com/rails-geekup.htm

Thanks again to the organisers and speakers :-)

Update: As if getting Carl's name wrong wasn't enough (Sorry again Carl!) I also forgot to mention the new North West Ruby User Group that was announced at the GeekUp. So if you're in North-West England and love Ruby/Rails join the user group. (I'm technically in the North-East, but I think if I keep my head down and occasionally throw in some Mancunian colloquialisms I may just get away with it).