Austin On Rails

The Details

Event: Austin on Rails Evening with Dave Thomas
Date: Thursday, July 6, 2006
Time: 7 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Location: UT Campus
Room: Taylor Hall 2.106
Topics: Rails, Agile Development, Ruby, Q&A

The Speaker

Dave Thomas is a well-known software development expert, particularly in the Ruby community. He helped write the Agile Manifesto. He is the author of many books, including the best selling The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, and Agile Web Development With Rails.

Event Parking

2 blocks away from Taylor Hall, there are 2 parking garages:

• SWG
• TSG

There are usually spots open around San Jacinto and 24th. Parking shouldn't be a huge problem since it is summer. There is some parking around the building but you want to make sure you read the signs so you don't get a parking ticket.

Acknowledgments

We'd like to send out a very special thanks to Tina Wang, Joshua Shanks, Justin Perkins (for the initial contact), and the UT ACM for hosting our meeting in the auditorium.

UPDATE: I've added this event to upcoming.org if you'd like to rsvp over there now.

Come on out to Frog Design for a local RailsConf preview. Local Railers Damon Clinkscales and Jim Freeze are going to share their talks with us and will be looking for feedback.

Rails and Asterisk Get A Dental Office Talking by Jim Freeze

Automation of Medical and Dental offices will be a $25 Billion business in 2007. But today, the online presence of most offices is non-existent.

This talk is how we have changed that for two offices and how Ruby on Rails, coupled with Asterisk (an open source PBX), can significantly impact re-appointment, patient communication and office workflow.

In addition, we look at how Rails and Web 2.0 open the door to make Medical/Dental Web Applications a reality.

Agile Databases with Migrations by Damon Clinkscales

Database migrations are often a pain in the neck. Fortunately, Rails includes several new features to help keep your database agile along with your code.

In this talk, we’ll walk through several example migrations, discuss how to work with legacy databases, and outline a set of migration best practices and gotchas to keep you on top of your game.

UPDATE: Damon has posted his RailsConf slides on his web site.

Mark your calendars, folks. This month, we've got Dallas Pool speaking about security (or the lack therof) in web applications, but especially how to build secure Rails apps. We also are fortunate enough to have Technoweenie (Rick Olson, a Rails core committer) coming up from San Antonio for an overview of some key aspects of the recently released Rails 1.1. Hope you can make it out to Frog Design (8th and Congress), as Austin On Rails continues to do its part to build Austin into a premier Rails development community.

My how the time does fly! Just wanted to post a note here that we are meeting next Tuesday on April 11th. Several of our members are stepping up and are going to let us know what they've been up to lately or shine a spotlight on a particular area that they are passionate about.

Here's the speaker roster for the night:

• Justin Perkins, speaking on RJS
• Sara Carlstead Brumfield, speaking on Dressr (ActsAsTaggable, script.aculo.us, Sortable)
• Sam Griffith, speaking on Having a Vision
• Skip Baney, speaking on Single Table Inheritance, Polymorphism

7-9pm at Frog Design (8th and Congress)

Can't wait!

I posted some pix of the SXSW Happy Hour on Flickr. If you have any photos you want to post to the group, drop me a line at rob at nonewmessages dot com.