I’ve started a new Ruby on Rails meetup in Nashville for beginners. We just our first meetup.

http://www.meetup.com/nashvillerails-beginners/

The format is 45 minutes learning, 45 minutes working in groups. It’s designed to be open to anyone, and you don’t need to have come before in order to plug right in.

RSVP’s were competitive for the first meeting, so if it interests you join the group and respond quickly if you want to go to claim a spot.

It’ll be meeting the 3rd Thursday of each month at Centresource

Special thanks to Centresource for hosting and also Max Beiser and Adam Scott and Jeff Felchner for coming to help mentor/teach.

I have a caution to people who are like me, and like the type of churches that I like: go slow in joining a coming church plant in Franklin, Tennessee called Redeeming Grace Church. The article says it plans to start services in October 2013.

I used to really like this denomination, Sovereign Grace Ministries, and if it had come to town a few years ago I would have been interested in joining.

I have not met the pastor, Dave Odom. I bet he’s a guy I’d really like. My concerns are not about him, but the denomination and it’s leaders.

I have no concerns about this church if they separate from Sovereign Grace Ministries.

Sovereign Grace Ministries(SGM) is calvinist, charismatic denomonitation that started in the 70’s/80’s in Maryland and has expanded to many suburban American cities.

They have deep problems right now that I suggest you wait out.

1. They have a pending class action lawsuit alleging a multi-state, multi-decade child-abuse ring that names the denomination and top leaders as defendents. I don’t know the truth of it, but I don’t think it’s frivolous.

2. Many member churches, including the largest ones, have left and are leaving the denomination over accusations of pride, arrogance and unChristian conduct among the leaders.

Research links

1. sgmsurvivors.com has many of the stories of the abused and how terrible the church leaders responded. sgmrefuge.com has some testimonies too.

2. Joshua Harris’s reasons for recommending SGM’s largest church leave the denomination last December

3. The full text of the amended lawsuit

Summary

I recommend no one join a Sovereign Grace church, at least not until some major repentance and healing happens. If you do join, get your questions answered before signing on the dotted line.

I had this problem when I emptied a gemset, and tried to reinstall gems with bundler and got this message:

Could not find twitter-2.0.2 in any of the sources

I checked rubygems.org, and the gem owner has yanked that version, and all versions of the gem before 3.0. I really wanted to use twitter-2.0.2. Here’s how to do it:

• Find this page for your gem and version: http://rubygems.org/gems/twitter/versions/2.0.2. I did it by googling “twitter 2.0.2 yanked”
• Click the Download link on that page. That will give you twitter-2.0.2.gem
• Copy that file to yourrailsproject/vendor/cache (creating the directory if needed)
• Run

  bundle install

We (the citizens) need ‘assault rifles’1 (really, all types of guns), to defend ourselves from 1) criminals, 2) foreign invaders, 3) if criminals takeover the government.

Pete Brumm is officially opening shop as a Nashville Ruby consultant. I’ve worked with Pete on the same project before, and recommend him as a developer.

When doing TDD, test driven development, how do you know when to stop testing?

Do you test every single little thing? Even your user authentication plugin? Even that you logo image has css class logo? Even code that’s getting called by other tests?

Nashville Software School is a new developer bootcamp to teach motivated students the basics of web development (HTML/CSS/Javascript + a framework like Ruby on Rails) that should prepare them for a job as a junior developer.

I was playing with Google’s search auto-suggest and tried “Why do christians” and saw some great questions people are searching for. Here’s my answer to them.

Only change nameservers for heroku if you are using the Zerigo addon.

[Updated for Rails 3]