Switching to Git: New Site gitbetter.com

I am finally giving in and moving most of my projects from Subversion to Git.

Follow my progress, tips, trials and tribulations at a new site: gitbetter.com

Ruby on Rails/EC2 Talk at Chicago Code Camp

I presented a talk called Building and Deploying a Ruby on Rails Application on Amazon EC2 at the first Chicago Code Camp at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, IL on Saturday May 30, 2009.

In the talk, I did a brief overview of the popular web framework Ruby on Rails and then a quick overview of Amazon’s cloud computing platform EC2. Given that Code Camp aims to be a code-heavy and Powerpoint-light conference, I spent a majority of my 75 minutes building a real Rails app and deploying it to EC2. I showed the power of convention over configuration, Active Record, deployment with Capistrano, database migrations, and other pieces of the Rails stack. (Projector woes prevented me from being as productive as I would have liked … but I still successfully got a brand new app deployed in the cloud via a 3G wireless card!)

My slides are available here: rails-and-ec2-rob-lambert.ppt

The code developed at the talk can be found at the following Subversion URL: http://subversion.assembla.com/svn/zabada_public/codecampbook/ (see the README for quick steps on deploying this example to EC2)

Thanks to the Chicago Code Camp folks putting on a great event!

Congrats to the Django Team for 1.0!

Chicago’s very own Adrian Holovaty and crew officially released their 1.0 of the awesome Django Framework. Congrats and best wishes!

The “web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” is used around the world by Everyblock.com, WashingtonPost.com, Pownce and I am sure many more to come with the “1.0″ blessing.

One thing that sets Django apart from a lot of open source projects is the stunningly awesome documentation. It’s been over two and a half years since my first interaction with Django, and it’s great to see them working so hard for so long to make sure that they get it right!