Brown Beagle Software

Jump start with ruby on rails training

The first week of November 2009 saw Brown Beagle Software run a Ruby on Rails training week for Australia's grass roots advocacy group, GetUp! The organisation has recently made the major shift away from PHP to Ruby on Rails. Daryl Manning, Director of Online Campaigning, cited the motivation for the move as a way to introduce a collection of rapid development tools and best practices in one fell swoop.

The course ran for 20 hours in total, with 12 hours dedicated to Ruby and Ruby on Rails education, with the final 8 hours to cover testing at all levels. The development team was quick to pick up the language, framework, and third party tools. Some practical work was completed through out the week in which the team created a contact system including the use of observers, and mailers, with rspec unit tests, cucumber feature tests, and development of machinist blueprints.

Since completing the training Daryl has said that the development team is "very excited" to begin developing with their new found skills. They will be making a jump start on progress by building on top of an existing base of open source and closed sourced systems.