UPDATE: Location: DATRAN MEDIA in the Omni Hotel Bldg. (7th & Brazos) - 8th floor - either meet by elevators or if they are unlocked, head on up!

Folks, we've got a stunningly good meeting lineup this month. In fact, it's safe for you all to come back after you skipped my talk last time. ;-) I am sad to say that I actually won't be able to attend this month's meeting, as I'll be in the Bay Area at Velocity Conference. I am leaving the emcee duties in Josh Baer's capable hands. If you are wanting to keep up to date with Rails or performance tweak some existing apps, you *must* come out to the meeting this time.

Client-Side Performance Measurement & Optimization by Eric Falcao

Performance optimization tends to focus on topics like database tuning or server-side caching with the goal of getting response times as low as possible. A recent trend in client side optimization has been found to provide huge performance improvements to the user's experience.

In this talk, we will explore how to best measure the client-side download time and look at how to implement best practices (from O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites) using a mongrel/rails/nginx stack.

Eric Falcao is a software developer at FiveRuns who has a passion for Internet startups and the business of software. Formerly of the .NET world, Eric is glad to be a part of the Ruby and Rails community and an advocate for the great startup climate in Austin. He blogs at http://austinentrepreneur.wordpress.com.

What's Coming in Rails 2.1? by Steven Smith

Rails 2.1 was announced at this year's Rails Conference and had 1,400 contributors which resulted in 1,600+ patches. A lot has been done since the release of 2.0, which occurred approximately six months ago. This session will cover the major new features of Rails 2.1 including UTC-based migrations, better timezone support, and better caching.

Steven Smith is the Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at OtherInbox. He also founded FiveRuns, a venture-backed start up with the goal of bringing a simpler, smarter solution to the Ruby on Rails monitoring and management marketplace. Prior to FiveRuns, Steven was the CTO of Tonic Software and SVP of R&D at Neon Systems. He was also Founder and CEO of Relational Development, Inc., a software company specializing in System Management solutions from 1991 to 1998.

ORM Deathmatch!

by Mike Perham

ActiveRecord isn't the only game in town when it comes time to access your database with Ruby. We'll take ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel, put them in a steel cage match to the death and see who emerges victorious. Attendees in the first three rows might get bloody so bring a poncho.

Mike is a Ruby developer at FiveRuns and faints at the sight of blood.

Sinatra - a Tiny Ruby Web Framework

by Damon Clinkscales

There are times when Rails seems like massive overkill, but you would still like to use Ruby goodness. This is especially true when your entire web site idea can be contained inside one file. We'll take a look at the features of Sinatra and play around with a sample application based upon it.

Damon is software engineer (doing mostly Ruby and Rails work since 2005) for VitalSource Technologies. He also recently created a Twitter/Flickr mashup called SnapTweet and is the leader of the Austin On Rails user group.

The meeting will be held at Datran Media @ 7th & Brazos - meet at the elevators. Socialization practice to follow.

Howdy Austin Railers!

This coming Tuesday will be our first time on our new schedule (4th Tuesdays), which was selected by our membership as the best night for us to gather.

We are are going to bring together two tastes that taste great together, Bootstrapping and Rails. We'll have two of the leaders in Bootstrap Austin (Bijoy and Edward) giving talks on bootstrapping and we'll be discussing how working with Rails can help you get that side project or software startup idea out of your brain and into the browser. We are also fortunate to have two bootstrappers, Damon Flowers and Dave Wolpert, sharing a brief overview of what they are bootstrapping, how it is going so far, and what tools they are using to build up their sites.

Bijoy Goswami develops universal models that help individuals and organizations unlock their fullest potential. He packages these models in stories, books, communities, training and web sites. A consummate evangelist for his various projects, he has been featured in local and national media.

Edward Cruz's day job is working as a grizzled IT veteran specializing in e-commerce implementations. His passion is in finding ways to extend current web technologies into everyday human endeavors in ways that are collaborative, cooperative, and progressive. His latest project, Molecular Thinking (http://www.molecularthinking.com), is an accidental web 2.0 site that enables collaborative online brainstorming and ideation.

Here's the rough agenda for Tuesday (with a little twist on our usual format):

7:00-7:10 Welcome and Announcements
7:10-7:35 Bootstrapping 101 - Bijoy Goswami, Aviri/Bootstrap Austin
7:35-7:45 Damon Flowers, Dwellgo - Overview/Feedback
7:45-7:55 Dave Wolpert, PubMaven - Overview/Feedback
7:55-8:05 BREAK / GIVEAWAY

8:05-8:30 Bootstrapping With Rails - Edward Cruz, Molecular Thinking/Bootstrap Austin
8:30-8:55 Meet and Greet (People Mashup - connect with bootstrappers in Austin)

I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about bootstrapping and how we as a group can help each other and others harness the power of Rails to create!

The meeting will be held at Datran Media at the corner of 7th and Brazos. Please try to show up around 6:30 so that we'll have time to get everyone shuttled upstairs. We'll meet at the bank of elevators just inside the door. Socialization practice to follow afterwards at a local pub.

Looking forward to seeing everybody!

Note: If you are interested in bootstrapping and you haven't yet watched DHH at Startup School 2008, you totally should. Turn comments off, though. You'll see what I mean. ;-)

Next Monday night (3/10/2008), we are having an AOR SXSW Happy Hour (sponsored by FiveRuns). The event is from 6-9PM in the Recreation Room at Buffalo Billiards (upstairs). There will be games galore (including Wii), beer, appetizers, and Rails geeks from all over the world. The first 100 attendees shall receive a very choice "Rails at SXSW" T-shirt. So, do come early!

You do not have to be a SXSW Interactive attendee (but if you are, just bring your badge) to enter the party. However, if you don't have a badge, please send an email to "sxsw [at] fiveruns.com" to reserve your party spot. If you're feeling particularly social and geeky, you can add your name to upcoming.org (currently over 70 Attending so far!)

Secondly, the meeting night poll concluded on March 1 and the results were strongly in favor of holding our meetings on the 4th Tuesday of the month (full poll results in the sidebar). We aren't having a regular meeting in March due to the happy hour, but we will begin our fancy new schedule in April, on April 22nd. So, please mark your calendars. I have updated the Google Calendar accordingly.

Looking forward to seeing you next Monday!

Howdy Folks

We had an awesome meeting last month and a great turnout (50-ish). We even had a shar-pei attend the meeting. Yes, we are that welcoming. The January meeting not only marked our first meeting at the new space at Datran Media, it also served as the backdrop for a photo shoot and article by Lori Hawkins of the Austin American Statesman. It was nice to have our little group featured so prominently.

Here are a couple of followups that you might like:

• Bruce Williams' Ruby 1.9 slides
• Bruce Williams' Ruby 1.8 / 1.9 comparison app
• Gregg Sporar's Ruby Tooling in NetBeans slides
• Gregg's writeup of his visit to Austin on Rails (and Atlanta)

Sun gave us some great prizes for the meeting (a few USB key drives and T-shirts), which was totally unexpected. Thanks Gregg and Sun!

Looking forward to the February meeting, everyone!