The organizer for this meeting is Keith Gaddis.

Welcome to 2012! From the looks of things, we are going to have a fantastic year here in Austin.

Beginner Talk

Backgrounding Tasks in Rails - Marcus Mateus

Frequently web applications need to perform tasks which can take far too long to handle in a healthy request cycle. Marcus will showcase a few options for moving tasks into the background, enabling quick responses to site visitors, using libraries like DelayedJob and Resque.

We are incredibly humbled and excited by the selection of Austin, Texas for RailsConf 2012.

Austin on Rails was founded at the end of 2005 by Damon Clinkscales, Rob Rasmussen, and Rob Jones, just as Rails 1.0 was about to release. We’ve been meeting monthly ever since and our membership has grown to 200+ and regularly host meetings of 50-75 developers. We’ve built a strong community here and we are ready to do everything that is needed to make RailsConf 2012 a resounding success.

Austin Web Community Bash

Tuesday, December 13, from 7-9 p.m. Buffalo Billiards (6th and Brazos)

Yes folks, It’s that time of year again! Come on out Tuesday, December 13, 2011, for a year-end gathering with many of the other tech and web meetups from around town.

Catch up with old friends and make new ones. Thanks to our awesome sponsors, we’ll have a sizable bar tab for the night.

This month, we’re excited to be doing a joint meeting with the Cassandra user group here in Austin!

BEGINNER TALK

Intro to Cassandra (And Connecting With Ruby)

Apache Cassandra is a scalable, highly available non-relational database designed to deal with big data in real time. After being open sourced by Facebook, Cassandra quickly became popular with sites like Twitter and Reddit for its ability to handle large volumes of low latency writes and reads while still tolerating node failures without disruption.

This month is all about deployment environments, including a hosted environment such as Heroku, or building your own private cloud with OpenNebula. The organizer for this meeting is Ethan Waldo.

Beginner Talk

From Process Model to Asset Pipeline - Chris Continanza / Deploying Rails 3.1 on Heroku - Terence Lee

In this talk Terence Lee and Chris Continanza of Heroku will take you through how deployment on Heroku works. We’ll start with the Unix Process Model and show how Heroku’s Cedar Platform focuses on deploying with this process model. Then Terence will cover strategies for deploying Rails 3.1 on Heroku and how Heroku makes it work.

Very excited for this month’s meeting! Your tour guide for the evening is Steve Sanderson (@stevesanderson) of Food on the Table.

We are going to have talks from developers at Food on the Table about moving from PHP to Rails and also several days in the life of Rails developers practicing lean startup principles. Founder of Food on the Table Manuel Rosso worked for many years at IMVU, the company which provided the ground for Eric Ries to develop/refine the principles of what it means to be a lean startup. Make sure to pick up a copy of Eric’s book The Lean Startup, which just came out, when you have a chance.

Exciting times in the Austin on Rails community! We’ve just come off of an another amazing year of the Lone Star Ruby Conference organized by Jim Freeze and a cadre of dedicated staff/volunteers. What a blessing it is for us here in Austin to have that conference continue to thrive.

This month, we are going to have talks from developers at Gowalla and Mass Relevance about common mistakes developers tend to make in Rails and how to run a high traffic Rails site with Varnish.

This month at Austin on Rails we’re going to “break it down now” for Rails beginners with a nice variety of talks from various community members. We’ll cover directory structure, MVC, routes, migrations, helpers, testing, and the new Rails 3.1 asset pipeline. We’ll also have Anthony Lewis (Rails developer and instructor) step in and educate us about building secure Rails applications.

Rails Beginner Lightning Talks! - Various Folks

This month at Austin on Rails is all about Rails forms and views - from forms internals to high-level UI frameworks. Learn how to hack the default form builder, extend it, or replace it completely with Formtastic!

Forms, FormBuilders, Helpers, and Tags - Scott Bellware

Compose more complex form helpers from Rails’ defaults, or build your own from scratch. Reduce duplicated view code and standardize UI implementation on your team by wrapping, extended, or replacing existing form tags and controls. Customize the FormBuilder and take control of views and form markup. This talk will go over the internals of the form builder and form helpers, demonstrating the evolution of a plain old view helper into a form helper touching on useful bits and pieces of Rails internals along the way.

This month at Austin on Rails, we’ll be diving into CoffeeScript and Sass, two technologies which are being bundled into Rails 3.1. Much love to Adam Michela for organizing.

Introducing CoffeeScript - Mattt Thompson

CoffeeScript will ship with Rails 3.1 to replace RJS as the preferred way to dynamically generate JavaScript. It’s a new language that takes the best parts of Ruby, Python, and others to ease the worst parts of JavaScript. You should learn it not just because it’s the new kid on the Rails block, but because it will expand your mind, and make you a better programmer. This presentation will take you through the basics of CoffeeScript, starting with a crash course in syntax, all the way to a working application.