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TSOT’s Ruby/Rails Project Nights – Starting January 8th

Bruce Lee, wearing a TSOT t-shirt and holding Ruby on Rails nunchuks.

The Quick Version

TSOT Ruby/Rails Night
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 (and the second Tuesday of every month)
@ TSOT’s office — 151 Bloor Street West (on the south side, just east of Avenue Road)
11th floor
Door open and food at 5:30 p.m.
Presentations start at 6-ish
FREE ADMISSION (but limited space)
To register, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

About TSOT

TSOT is a Toronto-based start-up that develops — look out, here come the buzzwords — social networking applications using Ruby on Rails. Our first applications are FraternityLive and SororityLive, social software built specifically for people in fraternities and sororities. Both apps are currently being tested with a userbase of thousands of university students and alumni, and we expect to release them in early 2008.

About Ruby/Rails Project Nights

We believe that it’s good for Toronto to have a healthy developer ecosystem — it’s good not only for us as a Toronto-based development shop, but also as a group of developers who are passionate about the work we do. We’d like to see Toronto as “Silicon Valley++” — with the vibrant high-tech scene, but with all the amenities that make Toronto a better place to live than the Valley (such as not being a dreary 50-mile stretch of suburbia and having decent places to go at night).

Hence our contribution to the local developer scene: TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Nights, which will take place on the second Tuesday of every month. They’ll feature in-depth presentations by developers working on interesting projects — primarily Ruby and Ruby on Rails — along with drinks and munchies and a chance to socialize with your fellow developers. They’ll be hosted by Yours Truly, TSOT developer and DemoCamp regular Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla.

The First Night: Tuesday, January 8th

This first Ruby/Rails Night will feature presentations by a couple of Ruby/Rails local heroes on their current Ruby/Rails projects:

The doors will open at 5:30, the first presentation will start at about 6, and we hope to wrap up the evening by 8:30 or 9. We’ll provide food and drinks, and if there’s enough of a demand, we can always go out to a nearby pub afterwards. There’s no cost to attend (but be advised that seating is limited).

If you’ve been thinking about making a Ruby or Rails presentation (perhaps you want to rehearse for RailsConf 2008!), we’d like to have you present it at one of our project nights!

Add TSOT Ruby/Rails Nights to your list of New Year’s resolutions!

How Do I Register?

Registration is free, but space is limited. To register for the upcoming Jan 8th gathering, please email joey.devilla@tsotinc.com

For More Information

For more information about TSOT Project Nights, please contact:

The event is also listed on Upcoming.org.

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Take the New Ruby for a Spin

The real point to take from Antonio Cangiano’s article, Holy Shmoly, Ruby 1.9 smokes Python away!, is not that Ruby 1.9 runs circles around Python, but that Ruby 1.9’s performance appears to be dramatically better than Ruby 1.8’s.
Keep in mind that the article cites only one benchmark, a simple Fibonacci script:


def fib(n)
  if n == 0 || n == 1
    n
  else
    fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
  end
end

36.times do |i|
  puts "n=#{i} => #{fib(i)}"
end

On Cangiano’s machine, Ruby 1.8 took 159 seconds to run the script. Ruby 1.9 completed the task 13 times faster, clocking in at just under 12 seconds.

I’ll repeat what I said earlier: this is just one test. If you want to give Ruby 1.9 a proper performance shakedown, you’ll need to install it on your machine and compare its performance with Ruby 1.8 using a number of scripts. Luckily, the Ruby Inside blog has an article titled How to Start Playing with Ruby 1.9 Right Now! that provides easy instructions for acquiring and installing Ruby 1.9 in its own separate directory. I may just have to take 1.9 for a spin soon.

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