{ |one, step, back| }
Speaking at the Columbus Ruby Brigade
15 Jul 05 - http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tech/Ruby/ColumbusRbTalk.red

Last chance to hear the “Dependency Injection” talk before OSCON.

To Columbus!

Joe O’Brian and Robert Stevenson of the Columbus Ruby Brigade (CRB) have invited me to come up to Columbus to speak to their group. It will be the last “practice” presentation of the “Dependency Injection In Ruby” talk that I have prepared for the O’Reilly Open Source convention (OSCON) coming up the first week in August.

So, if you are in or near Columbus next Tuesday night (July 19, 2005), stop by and say hi. I’d love to meet you.

Here’s the CRB announcement:

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. —Alan Perlis

The Columbus Ruby Brigade and Quick Solutions are proud to sponsor noted speaker, Jim Weirich, on July 19th at 6pm (Food served at 5:30pm) to give a talk on Dependency Injection titled, “Dependency Injection : Vitally Important or Completely Irrelevant?”

Jim will be giving his talk that he will also be giving at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference on August 4th in Portland, Oregon. That’s right folks … you’ll hear it here first!

So, for most of you, I’m sure you have a number of questions swirling in your head:

  1. Who is Jim Weirich?
    • (Official O’Reilly Bio) Jim Weirich is a software consultant for Compuware with over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Weirich is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.
    • (Rob’s Unofficial Bio) Jim is a world-renowned Ruby “Sensei” who has contributed the RubyGems and Rake build system that are used by just about every Ruby programmer out there. Also, Jim is very active on the Ruby and Ruby on Rails mailing lists helping out with answers and articles (http://onestepback.org) regularly.
  2. What’s the Columbus Ruby Brigade?
    • The Columbus Ruby Brigade (CRB for short) is the name for the local Ruby Users Group that was started earlier this year. The Seattle Ruby UG gets credit for the unique naming convention that most other Ruby UGs have adopted. The CRB was started because there’s a growing community of Ruby and Ruby on Rails enthusiasts here in Columbus that we know is going to continue to grow because of the fact that the Ruby language (and killer apps like Ruby on Rails) is more fun to program with than Java and .NET combined. Try it out for yourself and see!
  3. What’s this talk really about?
    • Here’s the O’Reilly promo about Jim’s talk: The Dependency Injection Pattern (also known as Inversion of Control) is a technique to reduce the amount of coupling in a program. Since reduced coupling is a noble goal of software developers everywhere, dependency injection is an important technique to know. The Java community has seen numerous frameworks built around dependency injection and inversion of control (e.g. Hivemind, Spring, Pico Containers). But programs written in a dynamically typed language are already fairly decoupled compared to programs written in stiffly typed langauges. Is dependency injection still important in a language like Ruby, or is it yet another technique from the Java world that has no place in the dynamic world of Ruby programming? We will look at basics of dependency injection and develop a simple dependency injection framework in Ruby. We will compare the framework to other decoupling techniques.

Here’s your chance to sit in on a presentation given by a true software craftsman to hear about Dependency Injection and specifically how it applies (or doesn’t!) to dynamic languages like Ruby. The CRB is really excited that Jim has volunteered his time to drive up and give us a presentation that you can only hear at a premier conference like OSCON.

Hope you can make it!

Here’s the location/general information:

If you look at the satellite image, the building is just NE of the Google Map marker (Triangular building). The parking lot isn’t huge, so there’s overflow parking to the lot just to the N / NE of the Quick building. FYI.