Austin On Rails

It's that time of year again, and SXSW is upon us once again. Come join us for drinks, pool and general debauchery at the first annual Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour.

Did I mention that the first 100 drinks are on us?!!

When and where

Bullalo Billiards
Corner of 6th and Brazos (Google Map)
Saturday, March 11 6-8pm

Details

The event is open to anyone who is interested in Ruby on Rails. We'll have a private room with pool tabless, shuffleboard and darts. Food will also be available for purchase.

For more info contact: info@austinonrails.org

Presentation

We are excited to have Bruce Tate speaking to the group! Bruce will talk about his experience using Ruby on Rails within a local conservative organization and with a startup. He'll focus on some of the interesting challenges within his projects:

• Ramping up a Java team to do Ruby development
• Building in reporting by reflecting on Active Record objects
• Working with large trees, with mostly read access
• Challenges

About Bruce

Bruce Tate is a father, mountain biker, and independent consultant from Austin, Texas. He is a reforming Java developer with six books, including Beyond Java. He has two books nearing completion, including Rails: Up and Running (with Curt Hibbs), and From Java to Ruby. Bruce does design reviews, education, mentoring and jump starts for lightweight processes and technologies, including SCRUM with test-first development, Spring/persistence strategies (on Java), and Ruby with specializations in Rails, including Active Record.

Hack-a-thon

We've talked a lot about Rails, but tonight let's roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty with some code! Bring your laptop and let's try to throw together a Rails app. We were thinking that it would be fun to write a member directory app for this web site, but if you have a better idea we are open. To participate in coding, please make sure you have Ruby, Rails and MySQL installed.

Time and Place

Tuesday, Feb 21 at 7pm
Frog Design
804 Congress Ave

Twenty-six of us attended the December meeting. After learning about Migrations and Ajax we went next door to Hickory Street and stayed til closing time. This month, we’re at the same place, but in a much bigger room!

Presentations

The basics of Ruby and why it’s cool

Ruby is radically object-oriented, sophisticated, and flexible. After covering the basics of Ruby, Hal will discuss the dynamic nature of Ruby and why you should care. He will show how you can add methods at runtime, the power of open classes (running with scissors), and how to use the method_missing method.

View Presentation

Speaker Info

Hal Fulton has two degrees in computer science and twenty years of industry experience. He is the author of The Ruby Way and has been using Ruby since 1999.

Debugging the Rails

So you’re developing your first web application on Rails, and you’re running into all sorts of problems. Whiny nils, missing methods, and unsaved assocations; what’s a developer to do? Rick will show you how to not only debug the problems you will face, but learn what the framework is doing under the covers.

Download Presentation [ZIP]

Speaker Info

Rick Olson has developed web applications using languages such as PHP, Python, ASP.Net, and Rails since 2001. He discovered Ruby on Rails in January of 2005 and saved himself from a career of delivering ASP.Net applications

Our first meeting was a blast — 21 people gathered for a decidedly friendly meeting. We’re getting together again to discuss Ruby and Rails, please join us for presentations followed by a social hour at Hickory Street Bar & Grill.

Presentations

ActiveRecord Migrations in Rails

You may have seen how easy it is to get started with a simple database for your Rails application. But what happens as it needs to grow? Eric explores how Rails migrations can be used whether you are just beginning your application, maintaining a production system, or wanting to port an existing application to Rails.

Download Presentation [PDF]

Speaker Info

Eric Stewart has been developing software for more than a decade in the areas of desktop products, mobile devices, enterprise software, and web applications. He spent a good part of his career working in Java and likes to work with tools like Ruby and Rails as much as possible.

Ajax and Rails

It’s almost impossible to read about web application development without seeing the term Ajax — but what is it really and how can we incorporate it in our Rails apps? Robert tells us all about it.

Speaker Info

The blogless Robert Rasmussen has spent most of his software development career building Java web applications. He’s been developing Ruby on Rails applications since December 2004.

Come join us for the first Austin Ruby on Rails User group meeting. We will have a few presentations about Rails followed by an open discussion. Let’s put Austin on the map as the place for Rails development!

Presentations

Intro to Ruby On Rails

Have you heard about Rails but don’t know what all the buzz is about? Rob will give a quick overview of Ruby, Rails, MVC, and why they all rock.

Speaker Info

Rob Jones can’t decide if he wants to be a coder or a designer when he grows up. He is currently a Design Analyst at Frog Design.

What’s coming in Rails 1.0

Damon takes a walk through the 1.0 release candidate and highlights some of the major changes that are coming in Rails 1.0:

• Plugins
• Database agnostic schemas
• A cleaner environment.rb
• Better session management

Slides[PDF]

Speaker Info

Damon Clinkscales is a software developer doing server-side Java development since 1997. In 2005, he made the switch to Ruby on Rails for web application development and has never looked back.