My talk on the Invoicing Gem 0.2

Published by Martin Kleppmann on 24 Apr 2009.

On Monday I did a talk in front of 80 or so of London’s finest Ruby developers at LRUG, to present the new v0.2 release of the Ruby invoicing gem. The main new feature of this release is a Rails generator script which can be invoked with script/generate invoicing_ledger in the root directory of a Rails project. This generates a default set of model objects, a database migration, a controller, views and some routes; enough to get started with using the gem’s features very quickly.

Note that the Invoicing Gem still isn’t Rails-specific – although the generator currently only works with Rails controllers and templates, the core of the gem depends only on ActiveRecord and can be used with framework components of your choice.

To demonstrate just quite how quickly the invoicing gem allows you to add commercial features to your application I decided that it would be a good idea to have no slides, but to spend the entire 25 minutes I was allocated to give a live demo. That is rather scary for a speaker because a million things can go wrong (and indeed several things did), but with a forgiving audience it ended up also being a lot of fun.

Skills Matter, who host the LRUG events, kindly recorded the talk and put it online. I have also embedded the video below:

It’s a bit hard to see exactly what I’m typing in that video, but you can follow the exact steps from the notes I wrote myself for that presentation, and the example application I used, cracktastic, is also on GitHub.

I have the feeling that I still need a lot of practise to improve my public speaking, but it’s not too dreadful either.