It’s Ruby Job Fair time! This Friday, May 20th, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., at the offices of Accordion City-based development shop Unspace (342 Queen Street West, just above the LuluLemon store), rspec::table, a.k.a. The Third Ruby Job Fair will take place. If you’re a Ruby developer looking for work, you also want to be at rspec::table. If you’re curious about developing in Ruby, guess what — you should also drop by rspec::table!

Among the employers who’ll be present at rspec::table will be my employer, Shopify. We’re sending a couple of people, including developer advocate Edward Ocampo-Gooding, down to Toronto to chat with developers and see who’s got the chop and the interest in working for the company who’s making the only ecommerce platform that matters. If you’d like to work for one of Canada’s most promising startups (who also recently landed $7 million in series A funding and hired Canada’s best tech evangelist), you should come to rspec::table and talk to Edward about Shopify!

At 7:00 p.m., the event will shift gears and become a special edition of Rails Pub Nite, the monthly get-together or Rails developers and their friends. This special edition will be an “afterparty” held on Unspace’s rooftop deck, which offers a stunning view of downtown Toronto that gets even more stunning as the sky gets dark. Free food and drink will be provided, and having attended a number of Unspace catered events, I can assure you that they’ll be good. The fun will continue until 11:00 p.m..

By the way, the regular edition of Rails Pub Nite, which takes place on the third Monday of every month, is still taking place tonight at its usual digs: The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West) from 7:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.. If I were in town, I’d be there.

If you’d like to attend rspec::table, you need to register (it’s a mere $5.00 to register)! If you want to attend the Rails Pub Nite afterparty, you also need to register (it’s free)! To register, go to rspec::table’s Guestlist page — and hurry before the tickets run out!

In case you’re:

• a programmer who works with the Ruby programming language
• looking for work
• available to get down to Toronto’s “West Queen West” neighbourhood soon

you might want to do what I’m doing in a couple of minutes (as of this writing): heading down to the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street West, at Dufferin) to get a look at employment.nil, which bills itself as “the first Toronto Ruby job fair”.

Organized by the fine folks at Unspace, who are also organizing the upcoming FutureRuby conference and FailCamp (where I’ll be the MC), employment.nil isn’t your typical computer programmer job fair. No computers are allowed! They’re going to be strict about it – even the use of iPhone applications is verboten. Bring printouts of your resume and some scratch paper to do “live coding”. I’m going to bring my mini-whiteboard and dry-erase markers.

See you there!

If programming in Ruby is your thing and you’re looking for work or workers, you should mark Saturday, June 6th on your calendar. That’s when employment.nil, Toronto’s first Ruby job fair, takes place at the Gladstone Hotel.

Organized by Pete Forde and the folks at Unspace – the local Ruby heroes behind things like the FutureRuby conference – employment.nil is an old-school job fair for Ruby programmers. In fact, it’s so old-school that no computers of any kind are allowed. If you’re looking for work, bring printouts of your code and be ready to write out ideas with pen and paper. If you’re looking for people to work for you, you can set up a booth, grade school science fair-style.

Want to find out more? Check out the employment.nil article in Rethink, Unspace’s blog.