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.

Please take a moment and sign up for any events that you are interested in!  Secondly, please tell your RailsConf-bound friends, especially those who are not in Austin, by forwarding this post to them.

Please join us for our Austin on Rails SXSW Bash this Monday night.

Rails geeks unite! We’ll be sharing good conversation, games (billiards, shuffleboard, and darts), cold beverages, and light appetizers while the guys from 500 Startups Console.fm spin some tunes.

We’ll also have a dedicated gaming room to ourselves with an old school game collection including Mission Control, etc. They will also have XBox set up on a large screen for our use.

We are incredibly humbled and excited by the selection of Austin, Texas for RailsConf 2012.

Austin on Rails was founded at the end of 2005 by Damon Clinkscales, Rob Rasmussen, and Rob Jones, just as Rails 1.0 was about to release. We’ve been meeting monthly ever since and our membership has grown to 200+ and regularly host meetings of 50-75 developers. We’ve built a strong community here and we are ready to do everything that is needed to make RailsConf 2012 a resounding success.

Austin Web Community Bash

Tuesday, December 13, from 7-9 p.m. Buffalo Billiards (6th and Brazos)

Yes folks, It’s that time of year again! Come on out Tuesday, December 13, 2011, for a year-end gathering with many of the other tech and web meetups from around town.

Catch up with old friends and make new ones. Thanks to our awesome sponsors, we’ll have a sizable bar tab for the night.

Awesome News! Barry Cox and Carlos Cabrera (the designer of the AoR logo) have put together a web site to buy the new Austin on Rails shirt!

We are rushing through the first order (must order before Monday, 5/2) so that those going to Railsconf can show their Austin pride.

Austin on Rails is proud to present our sixth annual SXSW Happy Hour…from humble bootstrapped beginnings to a fully sponsored event we’re excited to be hosting it again. We’d like to extend a hearty thank you to our awesome sponsors for making this event possible this time around. All of these companies are hiring Rails developers, so please give them a look…Capital Thought, Gowalla, PeopleAdmin, and Rackspace!

Hey Everyone

The recent Ruby in Austin survey was very informative. Thanks so much for your participation! We didn’t quite get to a resolution on every issue, but we did learn a few things.

1 Almost every respondent was interested in having a non-Rails Ruby meeting in the evening. (92%)

2 There is a large overlap of potential attendees (79% would like to attend both)

Howdy Folks!

We will not have an official Austin on Rails meeting this month due to the holiday season. However, you can escape the end-of-year madness for a few hours this Tuesday night (12/14). Come hang out with fellow Web professionals at the Austin Web Community Holiday Bash. It’s a chance to catch up with old friends and make some new friends. We’ve expanded a good bit from years past and are co-hosting the event with ten other groups. Ten! I love this town.

Howdy everyone!

Due to the Christmas holiday, we will be having a social event in lieu of a standard meeting. Normal meeting schedule resumes in January!

Party!

It’s time for the Second Annual Austin on Rails / Refresh Austin party and this time the fine folks of WordPress Austin will join us as co-hosts. Even better, the first 100 people to join us at the party will get a free drink thanks to our neighbor Rackspace (they’re right down the road in San Antonio).

Yes, we are having a meeting this month! I apologize for my tardiness in posting this note.

This month we’re going to go into the finer points of creating Rails forms with a screencast from Pragmatic called “Forms Essentials”. They’ve been gracious enough to give us permission to show the episode to our group. It’s a part of their Mastering Rails Forms series. We are also going to get an overview of CouchDB, a “distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API”, implemented in Erlang. Here’s a technical overview if you want to read up on it.

December 9th, 7:00 p.m. Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

Sponsored by Appozite, creator of CheapTweet.com and ZiteFight.com.

For December, Austin on Rails is shifting from our normal presentation-based format to a purely social gathering. We love to join up with other great tech groups in Austin, and this time we’ll be co-hosting the event with our friends at Refresh Austin. There’s some decent overlap between our groups, and it’ll be a great chance to catch up with friends you may not have seen in a while as well as meet new friends as passionate about the Web and technology as we are.

Next week, we’re going to join up with the Refresh Austin group on Tuesday night (12/9 at 7pm), for pints of beer and billiards at Buffalo Billiards on 6th. It’s become a bit of a tradition in Austin on Rails to have a holiday party in December. It’s still geeking out, but just with more beer and bar games.

This is a low frills shindig conceived so we can meet some more good web peeps here in town and chill out as a group in a social setting.

Meeting Details

inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor). As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

Come on out this month to Datran Media at 7th and Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor) to catch a tutorial on state machines and pick up some new Ruby ORM skills. As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

Please come out and mingle with all the Ruby and Rails enthusiasts visiting town for the SXSW Interactive Festival. We are taking over The Lodge at Buffalo Billiards at 6th and Brazos. This years party is going to be bigger than last year and all the food and drink is on the house, courtesy of FiveRuns. Please let us know if you are coming by registering at upcoming.org so we’ll have an idea of the headcount. SPECIAL NOTE: If you do not have a badge, you must also email me at scales pobox.com to RSVP for entrance to the party.