On Thursday night, attendees will socialize over drinks and celebrate RuLu 2013 at a comfortable venue.

All Rulu attendees and speakers are invited to a Dinner & Party at Le Koodeta, a Gourmet Restaurant & Pub located 15 minutes walk from the venue. Le Koodeta features a large patio with olive trees, an outdoor bar and confy sofas. We’ll go there right after the last sessions, to enjoy sunshine on the terrace and local food & wine treats.

This party couln’t happen without the support of Twilio, our party sponsor. Michael Wawra will speak at 12:30pm on he went form .NET to Ruby language. He’s also a developer evangelist at Twilio, so you’ll get to ask him any question you may have during the party.

Attendees may come to Lyon on the day before the conference. So we thought there was no point waiting for Thursday to get the party started!

That’s why we booked a few tables at the Brasserie F&G, 10 rue de la République, 69001 Lyon. You should meet there on Wednesday at 7:30pm and enjoy some French wine and food.

Greg Karékinian Github: gkarekinian Twitter: @gkarekinian Company: Green Alto Blog: Greg Karékinian

Greg is an infrastructure developer and a cofounder at Green Alto where he writes code that builds servers. After managing Linux servers in his bedroom in high school for fun, he learned HTML, CSS and PHP by himself. He never thought of making a career of it until it actually happened. He became a professional frontend developer back when you didn't have to know JavaScript, learned OOP, TDD and MVC all at one with Python, switched to Ruby & Rails around the release of Rails 2.0.

His talk: Dependencies, a boring, solved problem?

As Ruby developers, we all love RubyGems and Bundler. These tools are pretty amazing when it comes to installing the dependencies of your web app. Do they solve everything for command-line applications too?
In theory, you install the right version of Ruby and then run gem install. In practice, it's a bit more complicated than that.
I will show you examples of the different ways things can and will break, based on real issues I encountered as a developer and sysadmin. That includes dependencies that "work today!" (but probably won't tomorrow) and the mess created by the API instability in gems like json. We will also look at how other programming languages deal with library and their dependencies. Finally, I will tell you why vendoring everything in a system package is a good approach.

So we thought we’d put together some suggestions for things to do in Lyon after the Friday workshops.

Fête de la Musique in Lyon

Friday is Fête de la Musique (World Music Day) and Lyon puts on a huge party! As the evening wears on, the streets, squares and parks of Lyon fill up with musicians putting on concerts - details here (in French). So, whatever you choose to do following the workshops, do make Fête de la Musique part of your plans!

Getting information

The main information center in Lyon is in Place Bellecour. They also have a website that is worth checking out. Place Bellecour is well worth a visit - it is one of the central squares in Lyon and is likely to feature heavily in the festivities of Fête de la Musique.

Visit Old Lyon and the Basilica of Fourvière

Old Lyon (Vieux Lyon) is a great part of Lyon for a meandering walk and is a favourite amongst tourists and locals alike. It features Cathedral St Jean and several public squares lined with restaurants, bars, creperies and pubs.

If you are not averse to a climb, you can walk up to the Basilica of Fourvière and visit the ruins of the Gallo Roman amphitheatre. There is a guided tour or you can make your own up by arming yourself with a map and getting to Vieux Lyon metro (on the D line) and exploring the narrow streets of the quartier. There are a lot of Bouchons (restaurants typical of the Lyon area) in this area but be warned that several of them are overpriced tourist traps. Recommend stopping off at Nardone for an ice-cream or a crepe as you take in the sights. The view of Lyon from Fourvière is quite something and the walk through the gardens to the Basilica is very pleasant, so, if it’s good weather, this is a good way to build up an appetite!

Explore Croix-Rousse

Croix-Rousse is bohemian Lyon at it’s best! This quartier features some of Lyon’s best independent art, craft, food and drink. Want a souvenir to take home? You’ll find something original here for sure!

Start at the Hotel de Ville metro stop (on the A line), check out the sights around the Opera and Place des Terreaux, and then head uphill. You can find awesome, locally designed t-shirts at Laspid in Place du Griffon, some of Lyon’s best coffee at Cafe Mokxa (3, Rue de l’Abbé Rozier) and lots of studios and boutiques as you wander up the Montée de la Grande Côte to the center of Croix-Rousse. At the top you get majestic views over the presquile.

If you feel like a beer after your climb, suggest checking out Dikkenek Cafe at 3 rue d’Austerlitz, close to the center of Croix-Rousse.

Check out the Parc de la Tete d'Or

Feel like escaping the urban village? Head to 117 hectares of beautiful parkland in the north of Lyon. The Parc de la Tete d’Or is a great place to go for a stroll or a run. It has a lake, a zoo, and is right next to Lyon’s museum of modern art, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon. You can get to the Parc by walking there from the Massena metro stop (line A) or taking a bus to the Museum (the C5 from Place Bellecour).

Whatever you choose to do, we hope you have a nice adventure in Lyon! Please equip yourself with a map and have a safe and awesome time!

There are some late changes to the speaker list. It is with regret that we inform you that Carina Zona will not be speaking at RuLu 2013.

We worked with Carina to help find a sponsor to cover her costs for attending RuLu but, disappointingly, were unable to do so.

We will be announcing a new speaker to join the lineup for RuLu 2013 in the coming days - please check back soon.

Last but not least, you can now get your ticket for the Coding Dojo at RuLu!

There is no extra charge, but you will need a valid ticket for RuLu 2013 to register.

The Coding Dojo will be hosted by Haikel Guémar. To make it short, you will improve your skills in Test-Driven Development and make use of the SOLID principles. You will practice with a pair (in Pair Programming mode) during a serie of timeboxed katas.

About the Coding Dojo

Don’t know what a Coding Dojo is? Want to know more about the schedule? Haikel gives us a quick introduction to the Coding Dojo.

Fabien: What is a Coding Dojo?

Haikel: It’s merely a gathering of programmers practicing their craft without worrying about deadlines or pointy-haired bosses, a safe place to practice, experiment and learn new skills. More importantly, it’s a place to have fun together! The basic premise is: professionals practice to improve their skills, why shouldn’t programmers? Kent Beck defined himself as “a good programmer with great habits”. You can’t improve or build habits without practice, and that includes deliberate practice.

What is the schedule for this workshop?

I’ll start by presenting the concept of Coding Dojo and give out a few pointers on how to host one. Since we have enough time, we’ll practice two katas. Usually, a kata takes place as follows:

1. presentation of the kata
2. timeboxed iterations (followed by intermediate retrospective)
3. final retrospective

What will I learn?

You’ll practice pair programming, Test-Driven Development, emergent design, etc. The chosen katas will also focus on SOLID principles and using test doubles. Then you should be able to host your own Coding Dojo, either at your workplace or user groups.

What skills are required to get in?

Very little: you should know one programming language and how to use your testing framework.

What setup is required?

Bring a working programming environment with a testing framework. Anything is fine (IDE, text editors, etc.) as long as you’re comfortable with it. If you don’t know any testing framework, i suggest that you take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with minitest. Minitest is a full-fledged testing framework included in the Ruby standard library. It supports many testing features like TDD, BDD, mocking and benchmarking.

We are pleased to announce you can now get your ticket for Rails 4 workshop at RuLu!

There is no extra charge, but you will need a valid ticket for RuLu 2013 to register.

The Team

The workshop will be hosted by 5 skilled Rails developers, coming from Lyon and Paris:

• Franck Verrot
• Michael Baudino
• Nicolas Mérouze
• Nicolas Blanco
• Damien Mathieu

Each one will coach a group of 2-4 people.

About this workshop

To get a better overview, Damien Mathieu answered a few questions about the workshop.

Fabien: Why a Rails 4 and Ruby 2 workshop?

Damien: While the changes in Rails 4 have less impact on your application’s code than what we had three years ago with Rails 3, there are still significant changes.

The biggest change, and main reason for the major version, is that Ruby 1.8 support has been dropped. You need Ruby 1.9.3 or above.

So you not only need to get up to speed with the changes on Rails 4, but also the ones on 1.9. And as there aren’t much breaking changes between 1.9 and 2.0, we thought, just as many others around the globe that it’d be more useful to you get straight to 2.0.

What is the schedule for this workshop?

After a brief presentation of the main changes, we will split in small groups of 2-3 people, each group with a coach. You will then be able to start hacking on awesome stuff.

This workshop is intended for people with a minimum background on Rails.

What will I learn?

In this workshop, you will spend some time hacking with the new features provided by Rails 4 and Ruby 2.

Among other things, you will discover :

• How to use strong parameters to secure your app
• How to add live streaming to your app
• How to use the new view caching mechanism
• What are the new ruby refinements
• How to use the new keyword arguments

What skills are required to get in?

This workshop is intended for people with a minimum background in Rails.

If you know what def means, what a controller is, and how to implement one, you should be fine.

What setup is required?

You can come with a PC or a Mac. Linux is way better than Windows.

Ruby 2.0 should be installed on your machine before you come. You can install it with RVM.

Our application will require a SQL database. So you should install PostgreSQL on your machine too.

We’ll cover up the rest together!

Thank you all!

We are excited to announce that you can now get a ticket for the RubyMotion workshop at RuLu!

There is no extra charge, but you will need a valid ticket for RuLu 2013 to register.

The workshop is intended for 20 participants, no more. So don’t wait if you want to be one of them! Get a ticket before it’s too late!

RubyMotion workshop will be hosted by both Laurent Sansonetti and Joffrey Jaffeux.

About this workshop

Want to know more about this workshop? We’ve asked a few questions to Laurent.

Fabien: What is RubyMotion?

Laurent: RubyMotion is a toolkit that lets you write full-fledged iOS apps in Ruby, for iPhone and iPad. Actually, since version 2.0, you can also write OS X apps with it!

What is the content of the workshop?

We will introduce the iOS system, RubyMotion, then write our very first iOS app: a timezone converter! The workshop content is derived from our official training material. We will do the first exercise.

What skills are required to get in?

You need to know Ruby, that’s all!

What setup do I need?

Just bring your Mac, we will provide you with a special license just for the training.

What if I want to purchase a RubyMotion license?

If you are interested in RubyMotion after the training and want to purchase a real license, we will offer you a discount.

Thanks a lot Laurent!

Hi folks,

Here's information on how to get to RuLu 2013. As you already know, RuLu will be held at the Manufacture des Tabacs, in the center of Lyon.

Venue address

The address of the conference entrance is

20 Rue du Professeur Rollet
69008 Lyon
FRANCE

The place is also known as Université Lyon 3, Jean Moulin or La Manu.

You can view the map on Google Maps.

Coming to Lyon

By plane

The closest airport is Lyon-Saint Exupéry airport (LYS), which serves most countries in the western part of Europe. To get to the city center from Lyon-Saint Exupéry, take the Rhônexpress Express Tram with a guaranteed journey time of less than 30 minutes and no risk of congestion. You will arrive at Lyon Part-Dieu train station.

The Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG) serves more destinations. One can then take the high-speed train to Lyon (travel time is 2 hours).

Access by train

Lyon is a well-connected city deserved by several high-speed trains from Paris, Marseille, Genève, Toulouse and most major french cities.

The main train station near the conference venue is Lyon Part Dieu.

Coming to the venue

Once you are in Lyon, it is quite easy to come to the conference.

Walking from Lyon Part Dieu train station

The Manufacture des tabacs is near the main train station of Lyon. From here you can come by walking approximatively 20 minutes.

From Part-Dieu Vivier-Merle (in front of the mall), turn left on the Boulevard Vivier Merle and go straight on until you reach the University (Crossroad of Boulebard Vivier Merle, Cours Gambetta, Cours Albert Thomas)

You can view here the corresponding walk you will have to do from the Lyon Part Dieu train station to the venue entrance.

By bus from Lyon Part Dieu train station

From Part-Dieu Vivier-Merle (in front of the mall), take one of these busses of the Lyon Public Transportation Service (TCL)

• C25 to St Priest Plaine de Saythe and take off at Manfacture des tabacs stop
• C6 to Lycée Lumière and take off at Manfacture des tabacs stop

You can view here the corresponding walk you will have to do from the Manufacture des tabacs bus stop to the venue entrance.

By subway

The nearest subway stop is Sans Soucis. Once you get to this stop, you will have to go straight on the Cours Albert Thomas until you reach the faculty. It takes about 5 minutes from the subway station to get to La Manu.

You can view here the corresponding walk you will have to do from the subway station to the venue entrance.

You might find a map of Public Transportation Service of Lyon useful.

Accessibility

La Manu

The faculty is accessible to disabled people. However, the conference room contains a little podium (20cm height) and stairs to access the seats on the top of the room.

Public transport

All metro stations are accessible except Ampère and Croix-Paquet.

More information on the dedicated page on the website of the Lyon tourist office

As we're only a few weeks away from RuLu, it's finally time to reveal the full lineup of speakers we will welcome on stage.

We will have 9 talks, so here are the five names you were waiting for:

Michael Wawra Github: xmjw Twitter: @xmjw Company: Twilio

Michael is a developer evangelist at Twilio, helping people embrace cloud communications. He loves anything that can be programmed, especially things that can be connected into Lego. Prior to Twilio, Michael was consulting in the City of London - mostly building other peoples' websites. He was once involved in Telecoms R&D, and has a guilt-inducing software patent around the Linux IP Stack. He is forever looking for good causes to contribute code to, and always looking to iterate and make stuff better!

Vincent Tourraine Github: vtourraine Twitter: @vtourraine Company: shazino Blog: Vincent Tourraine

Vincent is a mobile developer focused on iOS, but he also builds websites from time to time. He lives in the beautiful city of Lyon and he works at Shazino, where he explores various Web Services in the name of Science. He also builds his own iOS apps at Studio AMANgA. Vincent loves looking at pixels, and things from outer space.

Arne Brasseur Github: plexus Twitter: @plexus Blog: @plexus Devblog

Arne is a professional software developer focused on web development. He's been passionate about Ruby since 2006, but has only really become involved in the community after moving to Berlin in 2012. He has worked in various fields, from e-commerce for telecom, concert tickets and resale, to medical OCR/OMR applications, and has made contributions to several Free and Open Source projects. His personal interests include both natural and formal languages, and he spent the best of two years in the far east learning to speak and write Chinese.

Thomas Riboulet Github: mcansky Twitter: @mcansky Blog: Random dev

Born in the south of France, raised in the wild with cats and dogs with Apple computers and Tolkien stories. Difficult to avoid the family trade and by 2000 he was writing code and compiling kernels. After riding a dragon and crossed Oz by train he came back to old Europe to write articles and solve problems in Ruby.

Joshua Ballanco Github: jballanc Twitter: @manhattanmetric Company: Burnside Digital

Joshua has worked with Objective-C since 2002 and Ruby since 2004. He has built operating systems with Apple, local news websites with AOL, and somehow managed to finish a Ph.D. along the way. Currently, Joshua is Chief Scientist at Burnside Digital where he works with an amazing team of engineers and designers to solve problems for a wide range of clients. He works and lives in Ankara.

We've seen so many of you register for RuLu 2013 even though we haven't annouced the speakers yet. Being trusted by the Ruby community is a great honour and we are truly grateful for your support!
You were right to bet on us. We are now ready to announce the first four of the amazing speakers who will delight you at RuLu.

PJ Hagerty Github: aspleenic Twitter: @aspleenic Company: Engine Yard

He has been a Ruby on Rails developer for the last 4 years. He currently works at Engine Yard as the US-East Team Lead and Community Lead for their world-class Application Support team. He also organizes the Western New York Ruby Brigade. While traveling to conferences and Ruby meetups around the US and Canada, he likes to spread the word on the importance of community and coding, stressing the importance of outreach and focusing on the human side of being a coder.

Carina C. Zona Github: cczona Twitter: @cczona Blog: See Do Teach

She is a web developer and consultant. She has taught for Girl Develop It, Black Girls Code, RailsBridge, PyLadies, and RailsGirls. She served on RailsBridge core team and Women Who Code core team. She is also a certified sex educator. In her spare time, she engineers baked goods.

Jérémy Lecour Github: jlecour Twitter: @jlecour Company: HotelHotel Blog: Jérémy Lecour

Jérémy has been a web developer for 12 years, passionate about all things relating to the web tech and always curious about new things to learn and use in his work and play. He has lead a small team for 4 years that use a heady mix of old and new tech on a site that helps search for and compare hotels. Jérémy is a Code Retreat facilitator and a core member of both Provence Linux User Group and Pastis Ruby Brigade in Marseille.

Benjamin Smith Github: benjaminleesmith Company: Pivotal Labs Blog: Ben Smith

Benjamin is a developer at Pivotal Labs. He has a strong passion for TDD, pairing, Agile and using technologies that get out of the programmer’s way (or the programmer out of the way). When not writing code, he follows his other passions into the outdoors to rock climb, back country snowboard, kayak and surf.

We are inviting the Ruby community to submit talks for RuLu 2013.

Want to come as a speaker? Have a look at CFP guidelines and then fill in the CFP form. We will let you know as soon as possible if your proposal has been accepted.

RuLu is a Ruby conference, so we are mainly (but not only) looking for Ruby topics.

All talks are in English and are 25-30 minutes long.

Following the runaway success of RuLu 2012 we're running a third edition!

Today, we're delighted to announce the official launch of the third edition of Ruby Lugdunum aka RuLu 2013, which will take place on June 20-21 in Lyon.

We will follow the proven formula of RuLu, which has established a solid reputation amongst Ruby conference in the French provinces: curated talks (in English), gorgeous venues, great atmosphere and excellent food (Lyon is the French capital of gastronomy)!

We expect about 200 attendees from all over the world, providing an opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones over these 2 days.

On Thursday June 20^th, there will be 8 speakers at the former Manufacture des Tabacs, now part of the University. Lunch and refreshments will be provided with generous breaks for attendees to get to know each other.

At the end of the day, dinner will be at Le Koodeta restaurant, a great place for enjoying food and drink while watching sunset.

On Friday June 21^st, the second day of RuLu, there will be several workshops.

After the official closing of RuLu, some fun is still in store, as June 21^st coincides with the French Fête de la Musique (World Music Day). There will be a lot of live bands in the streets of Old Lyon.

We are still working on the speaker lineup and those who are interested are welcome to drop us an email. We can already announce that Laurent Sansonetti (of RubyMotion fame) will carry out a workshop session.

Brace yourselves, we will release a batch of Early Bird tickets at the beginning of May.

To conclude, as it is a lot of work to make a conference happen, your support, help and advice are very much welcome. Send love or just say hello at hello@rulu.eu.