Austin On Rails

Greetings!

This month’s conductor is Rob Mack, a Rails developer at Spiceworks. Rob has been attending AoR since the first meeting and we are really pleased to have him.

Michael Marotta - Documentation for Developers

Alchemists claimed to transmute elements, delivering miraculous results by secret methods. The ruse needed to work only long enough for them to escape the king’s realm. In our time, scientists transmute elements (and transmute life) by methods that were published first in peer-reviewed journals, and now in textbooks. Too many software developers masquerade as code wizards whose smoke and mirrors need work only long enough for them to change jobs. Documentation - from the design to the helps - allows peer review, testing, and (if need be) falsification of theory.

Greeting Rails Aficianados!

Your conductor for the month is none other than Mr. Michael May.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s versatile platform-as-a-service offering. It provides developers with all the infrastructure necessary for running modern web applications. With services like Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks, it’s now easier than ever to get up and running on this flexible platform. For this talk I’ll take you step by step through the shortest path to get your Ruby on Rails application running on AWS. I’ll then follow up with a discussion of tools and best practices advice for scaling your application as it grows.

This is a guest post by Cheri Linwood, the organizer of the first Rails Girls ATX!

Rails Girls ATX came about as an accident. I’ve wanted to learn programming for a few years. Knowing this, my husband, Jeff Linwood (a programmer) is always on the lookout for classes or workshops for me especially those that are women-focused.

A few months ago, Jeff sent me a link about Rails Girls, a workshop designed to teach women Rails. I decided to check it and out. I was really excited when I read about the conference because it seemed to really encourage collaboration and encouraged beginners to attend. The only problem was that the closest event was in Dallas, and they had already selected their attendees.

Greetings Rails Gentlefolk!

There are many visitors are coming to these lands and welcome them, we will! SXSW is about to get underway, and we just wanted you to know that we’ve created a gathering spot for the web geeks among us to grab a drink, some appetizers, and chat about web technology.

Please join us for our annual SXSW Happy Hour at Buffalo Billiards on Monday night, March 11, from 6-9PM. We’ve reserved The Lodge, which has tons of billiards tables, shuffleboard, darts. There are also gaming consoles in the adjacent bar which will be fired up and ready to go.

Howdy Folks,

Your Rails conductor for this month is Tim Tyrrell, so hold onto your hats! He’s put together a blockbuster program for us. It should be a lot of fun.

If someone asked which tools and techniques you utilize to be an effective developer, what would you say? Do you have a few items in your “bag of tricks” that help you to accomplish your everyday tasks in a non-wasteful manner? Tim has thought about this question a little too often and hopes that you can take a few of his ideas and integrate them into your everyday workflow.

edit Ugh, 2013! Changed the title. Thanks Aaron from San Antonio!

Welcome to 2013, Compadres!

Brrrrrr!!!!! When you want to take a break from freezing your you-know-what off, come on out to Austin on Rails and hang out in the warm glow of Rails knowledge in the @capitalfactory!

We build web applications. But often times, we get lost in code and we might not be paying attention to what effects our changes actually have. The surest way to ensure we really didn’t break anything is to run through a “smoke test” but that takes time. And who really wants to click the same links over and over and fill out the same forms, over and over? Capybara to the rescue! Daniel will show us how to get Capybara installed and walk through building a simple smoke test for an application. Now, every time changes get made, we can ensure the web pages continue to work, but without all that time-consuming click-click-submit.

Greetings Compadres

Get ready to stuff your faces on Thanksgiving and then stuff your brain when you get back. Yes! We are meeting up for the November edition of Austin on Rails on November 27th. We’ve got two solid talks for you on backgrounding (beginner) and building robust applications (advanced).

At some point you’ll encounter a situation where something will be slow. 3’rd party service that takes 10 seconds to crunch data for you? Tons of database work? Generating a PDF and then emailing it? Save your Rails app some sweat and your users some heartache by offloading that slow job into an asynchronously processed queue and watch your troubles go away (or at least greatly diminish). We’ll mainly discuss Resque but we’ll talk about other options as well and why the term ‘asynchronous’ can be misleading.

Howdy Folks!

Sorry for the late posting. Austin on Rails is ON this month, on the Fourth Tuesday (October 23). You know how we do.

Your conductor for October is Damon Clinkscales.

Lightning Talks - Various

We’ll feature lightning talks from members for the first hour, in lieu of a beginner talk.

Daniel Hedrick - HAML and Presenters!

Have you rolled your eyes every time the literati have prodded you to switch to HAML? Looked at its goofy syntax and thought, “What’s the big deal?” Well, if you use a template language to present HTML view code and you cringe whenever you write bits of scripting in your views to check conditions, branch logic, and format information, then using HAML will make you a better programmer. But not unless you do it right. This presentation will give you the information and the strategy needed to build elegant, code-free views using HAML and the Presenter pattern.

Howdy Folks!

Sorry for the late posting. Austin on Rails is ON this month, on the Fourth Tuesday (October 23). You know how we do.

Your conductor for October is Damon Clinkscales.

Lightning Talks - Various

We’ll feature lightning talks from members for the first hour, in lieu of a beginner talk.

Daniel Hedrick - HAML and Presenters!

Have you rolled your eyes every time the literati have prodded you to switch to HAML? Looked at its goofy syntax and thought, “What’s the big deal?” Well, if you use a template language to present HTML view code and you cringe whenever you write bits of scripting in your views to check conditions, branch logic, and format information, then using HAML will make you a better programmer. But not unless you do it right. This presentation will give you the information and the strategy needed to build elegant, code-free views using HAML and the Presenter pattern.

Howdy Folks!

Your conductor this month is PJ Christie of CabForward.

Elasticsearch: Beyond the Railscasts — Scott Hamilton

Elasticsearch with the Tire Gem is an attractive search engine alternative to Solr/Sunspot and Sphinx/Thinking Sphinx. The Railscasts are a great primer and the documentation helps, but there are some gaps: how to include multiple models when building a json document for indexing, or how to create a custom analyzer for partial keyword matching. We’ll walk through some real world uses of Elasticsearch and how to get more out of the Tire Gem for interfacing with Elasticsearch.