This Wednesday, August 25th from 6pm to 9pm, Quickleft will be hosting a ruby-centric hack fest at their offices with a few other of Boulder’s dev shops. Helping out are…

• Pivotal Labs
• Viget
• Slice of Lime
• Imulus
• GB Studios

The general theme is test driven development (TDD). For a full list of potential topics and all other details, see the announcement. Come hungry!

The address:
1919 14th Street
Suite 714
Boulder, CO 80302

[Disclosure: I work at Quickleft.]

I’ve been having a lot of fun learning about and switching over to Ruby over the last month from PHP. As a part of this process, I’ve started to get a sense for the lay of the land of the Ruby community in Boulder.

Meetups

• Ruby Code & Coffee: A weekly meetup on Wednesdays at 8:30am. According to the Boulder Tech Calendar … “Get together with some other rubyists in the area to write some code, share stories, and swap ideas.”
• Boulder Ruby: Educational talks on Ruby, Rails, or other general programming topics at the Collective Intellect offices. Click the link for more info.

Dev Shops

• dojo4 is a Boulder based dev and design collective. They say it best themselves – “We will send ninjas.”
• Foraker: I haven’t had a chance to meet anyone from the Foraker team yet, but it seems they focus on Ruby/Rails development as one aspect of their full service offering.
• Quick Left is a web engineering firm helping young and established companies alike build and improve their products. (Disclosure: I am employed by Quick Left.)

Conferences

• Mountain.rb Conference is a new single-track event being held this fall around the same time as boco and Startup Week. This should be awesome!

I’m excited to start checking out some of these events and meetups, and will hopefully meet some new Boulder people along the way. Let me know if you have anything to add to the list!

UPDATE: If you’re interested in learning Ruby, make sure to check out the hilarious _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby