Pretty simple idea, an expert Rubyist and a newbie pair for the evening. They build anything they like in the time available. Then at the end each pair shows off their app with the newbie highlighting what they have learnt. The newbie gets to learn from an experienced Rubyist, and the expert gets to pass on knowledge. I think everyone will get a lot out of this one. Obviously need a good skill level mix for this to work.

As a newbie, I've read a bit and watched some screencasts about testing in Ruby, but what does this look like in the real world. What gems do you use and how? Cucumber, RSpec, Shouda, TestUnit, Mocha, FactoryGirl etc? What do you test, everything including views, if so to what degree? Would be nice to see a walk through of someone driving out a feature using their normal testing stack and workflow.

All too often your javascript ends up without any explicit unit testing. Enter Jasmine. Here we'll see what it is and what it can do.

What are Capistrano and Passenger and what can they do? A talk starting with the very basics moving through to the more advanced features of these two deployment tools.

Could give an overview of the new features available in Ruby 1.9.2 with demos of the most interesting ones. What problems might we encounter when upgrading from 1.8.7? Tips or advice?

Show the group what SASS or SCSS is and what the benefits are. How should we use them and structure our source files? Show us some killer features. Also are there any hosting issues especially when using a read only host like Heroku?

What's the best editor for Ruby and why? TextMate, RubyMine, Vim, Sublime or something else? Show us what you can do with each one and where applicable what plugins should we be using? Also, for the newbie out there, give us some pro tips like keyboard short-cuts or anything else that boosts productivity.

Start off with a beginners introduction to what Rack is. Then move on to some samples from something simple to more advanced stuff. How does Rails 3 use Rack and how can we leverage this to do some funky stuff?

With all the talk around CoffeeScript as the default in Rails 3.1 this talk should be an introduction to what it is, how to use it and what the benefits are.

An evening where you get to show the group what you've been working on. Show us the code and tell us about the lessons you've learnt. What gems did you use and why? This night is about sharing experiences so we can all improve. Probably need more speakers than the usual 2 (maybe 6 with 20 mins each). BTW, this is not for you to do a sales pitch for your product :o)

I'd like to hear about the techniques you've used to create a scalable Rails app from hosting to profiling your web app. From your experience what lessons have you learnt and what tips and tricks would you like to pass on.