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.

Here are the links for the slides:

Rob Mack's Performance Tuning Your Rails App

Rein Henrichs' REST and Rails: Web Services for the Rails World

Rock!

Performance Tuning Your Rails App

Writing Rails applications is easy, writing fast rails applications can be trickier. We will take a look at how to diagnose and solve some common performance issues with Ruby on Rails applications. We will focus on optimizing a typical Rails application at three levels: the Rails framework, ActiveRecord and MySQL. We will also discuss some tools available to help you find and fix issues at these three levels.

Rob Mack has been developing Java and Ruby on Rails web applications professionally for about 3 years and is currently working as a Rails developer for VitalSource Technologies.

RESTful Rails Web Services for the Rails World

A common-sense guide to creating and consuming RESTful resources in the Rails world. Understand the Resource Oriented Architecture and how you can make your application a first-class citizen in the programmable web.

Rein Henrichs is a Software Engineer at Facilities Technology Group. He has been designing for the web for 5 years and working with Ruby and Rails for over two years. He contributes to various open source projects, including Merb, DataMapper, and Eskort. He is passionate about web standards, creating joyful user interfaces, and the programmable web.

Socialization practice to follow at Hickory Street.

Looking forward to see you there!

P.S.

I'm thinking we should get together for the holidays again at Dave & Busters? We could throw back a few beverages and play some games. What do you think?