Michael Bumann

Nodecamp.eu was nothing but an incredible event and I was told that people really enjoyed and loved it. The quality of discussions and talks was just mind-blowing. For me I can also say the best event I’ve co-organized ;)

For those who haven’t attended: What is nodecamp.eu?
It’s a fully community driven event. No marketing bla bla. focus strictly on content, inspiring and educating talks, great hacking. A product of everyone’s participation. If you haven’t attended, ask someone who has been there. 

Lately more people have asked me about nodecamp.eu in 2012:

Will there be a nodecamp.eu in 2012??

To make it short: YES! we want to have a nodecamp.eu 2012. 

But for 2012 I’d like to propose something… Nodecamp.eu has been about bringing passionate people together, learning and pushing the node.js community. In 2011 we gathered at cowoco in Cologne/Germany but this is an european, international event! So Tim and I would like to see nodecamp.eu beeing hosted in another country.

We’d like to turn the nodecamp.eu into an yearly event hosted in different countries.

- somewhat similar to the Euruko. It shall become the yearly node.js event organized by the european node.js community. 

Over the next week I will turn nodecamp.eu into the central resource for the event in 2012 and the next years. 

What do you think?
What would you like to the nodecamp 2012 to be? 

As you might have heard, next year is the european football (soccer) championship and like for the last worldcup Railslove has an awesome betting community aka Tippspiel in the making. The Tippspiel was a big success at the latest world championship so we’ve decided to improve it and offer it for the Euro 2012. 

So what is it and who is it for? 

It’s a corporate betting community. The branded community app around the Euro 2012. Allowing companies to create their story around the 2-3 month long event. Features include: full customization, user/groups rankings, user 1:1 prediction battles, news and real-time results etc. ;) I don’t want to tell to much here, but drop me an email if that sounds interesting for you or someone you know.  

Here is a preview of our Railslove game. hope you all will join next year: 

or maybe: :D

Last week a few rubyists met for some Glühwein and discussed the plans for the ruby meetups here in Cologne next year. These are the results. 

• next meetup: 18. Januar 2012
• the location rotates and we’ll meet in different locations every month.
• we’ll setup a new mailing list on google groups which is easier accessible as the current mailing list
• we’ll use hack hcking.de to publish the events and to have an ical feed
• we’ll create a new website based on the Hamburg Usergroup
• Cologne.rb will be the name thus we’ll have colognerb.de and koelschrb.de

What have I forgotten? See you next year! 

Just a quick reminder we will meet tonight at the christmas market at Heumarkt. We’ll meet exactly here.

if you don’t find us. call me and follow my tweets.

In November 2005 we’ve started the first Ruby usergroup in cologne. Back then we’ve been 4 people who met for beers. This was nearly exactly 6 years ago.  Unfortunately the meetup has soon become inactive - actually I can not remember when that was and how it happened.

After that, I guess in 2007 the rurug.de started with greater success. It was a meetup which first took place in the rooms of the Chaos Computer Club Cologne. Sadly I haven’t participated in that meetup very activly :( *bad bumi*

Early this year the meetup then has moved to cowoco and renewed itself with about 30+ people attending. The following events had been awesome! Great talks and even better discussions. Unfortunatelly, after summer we’ve became very inactive again. Not many people participated on the mailing list and the event hasn’t taken place in the last two months.

WE NEED TO CHANGE THIS!!

And now is the time to rethink the meetup.
I know we have so many awesome ruby developers here in cologne, working on exciting projects! 

We need to connect, share, teach in our local ruby community!
Let’s work together to bring back one of the best tech meetups in Cologne!

To get this started again I propose the following things:

• changing the mailing list to something that is more accessible.
  This is something I’ve heard several times. The current mailinglist is kinda hard to follow and it’s hard for people to get into the conversation. -this is especially the case for new people.
  I also think the mailing list has some spam issues?!
• maybe using a google group for now. I do not really like google groups but it works for cologneJS.
• better organizations/archiving of the talk material like slides etc. - obviously ;)
• inviting more speakers
  speakers exchange is a great. I herby invite @joshkalderimis to tell us about travis-ci
• meetup for some delicious Glühwein on the christmas market to discuss these things
  Date: 14th Dez. 07:00pm at Heumarkt

What do you think? How do you feel about the cologne ruby meetup? Who joins me?

Cologne.rb let’s unite!

Since today is Thanksgiving I was thinking what I’m thankful for in my everyday developer life. These were the first 3 or 4 things that came to my mind.  

my coworkers and our clients: For making everyday a new exciting challenge. for allowing me to work on exciting projects and to learn every day. For giving me freedom and inspiration to experiment. Without you this would be pretty boring. <3 <3 <3

Github: Can you imagine the time without github? I can not. Github made it so super awesome to share code and work together. Following and participating in OpenSource projects got so easy that it boosts my learnings everyday. Without github my developer life would be not so exciting and I would be a far worse developer.

Twitter: Twitter has become one of my main sources of information and about staying in touch with ppl all over… actually either you know why or you would not understand. ;)

The ruby community for beeing friendly, helpful, innovative, awesome. MINSWAN!

-  on a sidenote: why haven’t I heard any german Erntedank stuff on the web in the last weeks? 

The upcoming saturday (Dez. 3rd) is Global Day of Coderetreat. It’s a world-wide event celebrating passion and software craftsmanship. 

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design.

You can find more information about the Coderetreat format and the event on the official website. For cologne all the information is on a github wiki and you should follow the office twitter account for updates.

Fellow Railslover Paul is currently taking pictures of the whole team. For that he also asked everyone to show what’s in our bags and took pictures of the belongings. 

I really love the results. What are the pictures telling about the people? ;) 

Have a look at the first batch of pictures in the photoset on facebook.

And what’s in your bag?