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I’ve watched quite a few Google tech talks in the last few months. There are lots available. Here are some of the ones I found interesting (If you have recommendations for good talks that I haven’t listed below please leave a comment).

I’ve been playing around with merb recently (version 0.4 was released last week). Merb is a small ruby MVC web framework. It concentrates on providing a small core of features and leaves it up to you to do the rest either through plugins or custom code. For example, it doesn’t provide a database ORM layer but you can can use ActiveRecord, DataMapper, or Sequel by selecting the appropriate plugin. The Merb code is small and easy to understand. One of the nice things about it is that you can dive in and understand what’s going on in a very short amount of time.

Barcamp Galway finally came around on Saturday. I enjoyed the day. Thanks to all the attendees, presenters, panelists, sponsors etc for making it work.

We had somewhere between 40 and 50 attendees on the day. There were 17 talks and 3 panel discussions. We had 3 rooms, 2 with talks going all day and 1 for breakout sessions. Conn Ó Muíneacháin set up a live stream for one of the rooms. We used a jaiku channel for live updates throughout the day.

Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on remote machines. Think of it as being like make, ant or rake but targeted for remote tasks. You can use it to automate deployment and management of your remote machines.

I love cheat sheets. I print them out and stick them on the wall in my workspace. They help me to memorize and discover methods and commands and they reduce the amount of time I spend looking stuff up. Here is a list of the ruby and rails related cheat sheets that I’ve found useful. Links are to PDFs where available.

I went to the Ruby Ireland meetup in Dublin last night (I had to deliver some books). I left Galway at 3:30pm and got back at 1:30am. That’s a long way to go to talk about ruby but it was fun. It was great to meet up with people I hadn’t seen for a while again and meet some of the others that I only know from online. Still I didn’t get to talk to a lot of the people there - hopefully I’ll make it down to some more in the next few months.

Apress sent me out some ruby and rails books for Ruby Ireland. See the post at rubyireland.com and the thread on the mailing list for more details. Thanks Apress!

RubyIreland now has a website at http://rubyireland.com to go along with the mailing list and the irc channel. Thanks to Olivier and Chris for working on this. Here’s Olivier’s announcement.

Patchwork builds web applications.

Watch this space.