JRuby Evangelism Improvement Proposal

dubstep · November 8, 2011, 5:33pm

= Introduction =

Improving user outreach is a goal for many open source projects. I
believe that JRuby has such a goal, and wishes to reach out to as many
users as possible. As a big fan of Ruby, I tend to keep close tabs on
many of the Ruby implementations, JRuby being one of them. After doing
this for a good amount of time, I’ve noticed a bit of diffusion in
community outreach. With this in mind I’d like to propose a few changes
that I believe would have a positive impact on JRuby community outreach.

= Blog Updates =

Often I see news floating around about how people use JRuby, or
enhancements to JRuby. These are great pieces to get everyone excited
about JRuby, but they lack a centralized and official source. As such,
I’d like to offer my contribution to the JRuby blog to keep it active.

My original plan will be to update the blog as I get relevant
information. Once I’ve got an idea of the pace of information, I can
start to setup a more static schedule. I believe it’s easier on users
when they know the exact time / day to expect news.

= Job Listings =

I’ve noticed a lot of JRuby jobs pass by, and I believe there would be
benefit in setting up an official listing source. The goal here would be
to have a JRuby jobs twitter account that would contain a feed of job
listings for JRuby related positions. This will help in creating an
official centralized location for potential employees to find new jobs,
and potential employers to reach out to candidates.

I don’t mind scanning the twitter sphere for job related posts to
populate the feed with them. Users would also be able to alternatively
cc or DM the account to get listings added.

= Debugging Tools =

We have a good number of resources on the wiki for contributing to the
JRuby project. One thing that might be good is to have a listing of
tools that can assist in the debugging process, in addition to a basic
guide on debugging a simple JRuby bug (this could be a bug that was
solved previously).

= Presentations =

Having a lot of JRuby presentations at conferences is a major plus.
Currently there is a page for presentations:

But it needs some updating, as the hosted talks stop at around 2009. Is
there a process for getting slides and related content on this hosted
site? For now, I have a work in progress wiki page that I will be
updating here:

Also, it would be beneficial to have a generic template for JRuby
presentations (branded as a bonus), that presenters could work off of
when doing their slides.

= Conclusion =

That’s it for now. Please let me know if this seems suitable for helping
spread the JRuby word

Chris (Twitter: @cwgem)

supasta · November 8, 2011, 8:16pm

Chris this is all awesome, both Nick and I have responded about the
blog updates to you which seems like something which can help make
happen very quickly. If there is a particular URL/host needed for job
feeds then let us know and we can get something set up for you.

Thanks for helping out with this stuff. One thing I would like to
see in our presentation site is a few presos getting marked as being
reusable for anyone who wants to make a JRuby presentation at a
conference. We should have one nice recommended preso for:

JRuby for Java conference
JRuby for Ruby conference
Intro to Ruby/JRuby long format source/university

After seeing Reinhold’s JavaOne Keynote slides on Java 7 features I
have the desire to attack all of our introduction to Ruby slides and
make them transition nicely as a better visual preso. I might take
one ‘for Java’ preso and try and generify it for use by anyone
(probably a few fill in blanks section for personalization).

It will be exciting to see community resources get more organized!

-Tom

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Chris W. [email protected] wrote:

= Job Listings =

= Conclusion =

–
blog: http://blog.enebo.com twitter: tom_enebo
mail: [email protected]

supasta · November 8, 2011, 11:14pm

On Nov 8, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Chris W. wrote:

= Blog Updates =
snip
= Job Listings =
snip
= Debugging Tools =
snip
= Presentations =

These are all great ideas. Most of the JRuby posts I see are on headius’
personal blog. The other EY project (Rubinius) has the blog as part of
the github repository. You can push blog posts to the repository and
regenerate the website to get a post up. It’s pretty neat. Maybe
something similar could be done here for workflow.

cr

supasta · November 8, 2011, 11:26pm

On Nov 8, 2011, at 5:13 PM, Chuck R. wrote:

These are all great ideas. Most of the JRuby posts I see are on headius’
personal blog. The other EY project (Rubinius) has the blog as part of the github
repository. You can push blog posts to the repository and regenerate the website
to get a post up. It’s pretty neat. Maybe something similar could be done here for
workflow.

I’m a big fan of Awestruct (http://awestruct.org/) for this kind of
workflow - it’s a static site generator written in Ruby and very easy to
extend. The entire torquebox.org site is generated with Awestruct with
source hosted on GitHub (GitHub - torquebox/torquebox.org: TorqueBox website)
making it easy for people to fork, clone, test locally, and send pull
requests. We have CI jobs wired up to automatically deploy to a staging
server on every commit and deploy the site to production when changes
are committed to the production branch.

If you want a few more examples of awestruct sites, check out
http://boxgrinder.org and http://netty.io . There are other static site
generators that do similar things, but Awestruct is my personal favorite

Ben

supasta · November 9, 2011, 1:42am

On Nov 8, 2011, at 4:25 PM, Benjamin B. wrote:

= Debugging Tools =
snip
= Presentations =

These are all great ideas. Most of the JRuby posts I see are on headius’
personal blog. The other EY project (Rubinius) has the blog as part of the github
repository. You can push blog posts to the repository and regenerate the website
to get a post up. It’s pretty neat. Maybe something similar could be done here for
workflow.

I’m a big fan of Awestruct (http://awestruct.org/) for this kind of workflow -
it’s a static site generator written in Ruby and very easy to extend. The entire
torquebox.org site is generated with Awestruct with source hosted on GitHub
(GitHub - torquebox/torquebox.org: TorqueBox website) making it easy for people to fork,
clone, test locally, and send pull requests. We have CI jobs wired up to
automatically deploy to a staging server on every commit and deploy the site to
production when changes are committed to the production branch.

If you want a few more examples of awestruct sites, check out
http://boxgrinder.org and http://netty.io . There are other static site generators
that do similar things, but Awestruct is my personal favorite

We already have a new JRuby Jekyll-based blog at http://blog.jruby.org/
(GitHub - jruby/blog.jruby.org: This is the site and data for blog.jruby.org). Consider this a public call
for posts…I mean pull requestsposts.

/Nick