Welcome to summer, Rails Aficionados!

Part-Time Comedian and Full-Time Developer Mando Escamilla is your Rails Conductor this month.

Mando Escamilla - Tell Us Another Story, Grandpa: Lessons Learned Over 16 Years as a Developer

The software development world is a twisty maze of passages, all alike (at first glance). It can be slightly perilous and a little scary, especially if you’re just starting out. What kind of job should you be looking for? What skills do you need? How much should you ask for?

Greetings!

This month’s conductor is Rob Mack, a Rails developer at Spiceworks. Rob has been attending AoR since the first meeting and we are really pleased to have him.

Michael Marotta - Documentation for Developers

Alchemists claimed to transmute elements, delivering miraculous results by secret methods. The ruse needed to work only long enough for them to escape the king’s realm. In our time, scientists transmute elements (and transmute life) by methods that were published first in peer-reviewed journals, and now in textbooks. Too many software developers masquerade as code wizards whose smoke and mirrors need work only long enough for them to change jobs. Documentation - from the design to the helps - allows peer review, testing, and (if need be) falsification of theory.

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.

Listen up, nerds! This is Mando Escamilla, your conductor for the June Austin on Rails.

Have you ever thought, “Geez - I’ve always wanted to get up on stage, in front of a bunch of strangers and talk and talk and talk but I’ve never had the chance.”? WELL NOW’S YOUR CHANCE! This month we’re going all lightning talks, all the time.

What’s a lightning talk, you ask? Well that’s a fantastic question - you’re very clever.

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.

Exciting times in the Austin on Rails community! We’ve just come off of an another amazing year of the Lone Star Ruby Conference organized by Jim Freeze and a cadre of dedicated staff/volunteers. What a blessing it is for us here in Austin to have that conference continue to thrive.

This month, we are going to have talks from developers at Gowalla and Mass Relevance about common mistakes developers tend to make in Rails and how to run a high traffic Rails site with Varnish.

This month at Austin on Rails we’re going to “break it down now” for Rails beginners with a nice variety of talks from various community members. We’ll cover directory structure, MVC, routes, migrations, helpers, testing, and the new Rails 3.1 asset pipeline. We’ll also have Anthony Lewis (Rails developer and instructor) step in and educate us about building secure Rails applications.

Rails Beginner Lightning Talks! - Various Folks

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)

Thanks to Tim Tyrrell for organizing the Rails meeting this month. Looking forward to this event.

Refactoring WTF into OMG — Strategies for success - Keith Gaddis

Rails is a powerful platform that gives us lots of tools for creating solid web apps. Unfortunately, with that power comes a high likelihood that you’ll shoot yourself in the foot at some point, or inherit the results of someone else’s education. If you’ve ever inherited someone’s early experiments in Rails development, built a project without a test suite, or just have a plain old legacy application to maintain (or some combination of all three!) this is the talk for you.

This month we’re going to split our time between Rails and Ruby. Our first talk will delve into handling corner cases of Rails and the other will explore programming Arduino hardware with Ruby. Come out and join us to learn something new, meet great people, and who knows…maybe even drink a beverage after.

The Rails Box is Awesome, But It Has Corners - Jeffrey Taylor

Rails is intended handle the tasks needed by 80-90% of the Websites. Or is it 80-90% of the tasks in a Website. This talk is about identifying that 10-20% and some options for dealing with it. As the jazzman said, “You can’t play out of the box if you don’t know where the box is.

This month’s meeting is organized by Keith Gaddis of Collective Idea. Thanks for the help Keith! This may be the most epic meeting we’ve had in a long time.

Database Anti-Patterns - Xavier Shay

Things people often do in rails that they probably shouldn’t.

Xavier has been using Rails for many years, and worked with all sorts of databases: from universities, to high traffic websites, to financial exchanges. He is currently running training sessions throughout the US on how to use your database to write rock solid Rails applications.

Mattt Thompson - I18n and L10n on Rails 3

In this talk, you’ll learn everything you need to know to get your site ready for a global audience. After a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of software internationalization and localization, we’ll take a deep dive into the Rails 3 I18n API and other useful tools and plug-ins.

Mattt Thompson (@mattt) is a hacker and iPad developer at Gowalla.

Railsconf 2010 Recap

Rails 3 Overview / Merb to Rails 3

Richard Schneeman - Rails 3.0 Email

No matter what new communication protocols we adopt in the future, email is here to stay. So if you’re not taking advantage of ActionMailer in Ruby on Rails you’re missing out. In this talk, we’ll cover ActionMailer basics as well as the changes coming to email in rails 3.0. We’ll go into depth on sending & receiving emails, as well as the testing techniques used to make sure that WhySpam.me stays up and running. For those of you that haven’t delved into guts email before we’ll be introducing how email structure including MIME types and discussing some different ways to set up your own production mail server.

Merry Christmas! Oops wait…wrong month. It’s 2010 folks…and it’s shaping up to be a good one for the Austin Rails community. Our community is stronger now than ever and we’ll continue with our work (ha! we are coding in Ruby after all) this year.

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).

What should we do for the August meeting? Our fearless leader (wait, that’s me) is going to be out of the country (well not really, but you get the idea). I can’t be at the meeting.

What should we do for the meeting? Who can help out? More mini-talks? Does anyone have an interesting topic up their sleeve?

You’ll have the undying gratitude of your Rails peers if you do something.

Thanks!

Learn about Cucumber and Rails!

Nicholas Cancelliere will demonstrate how to hit the ground running with Cucumber: a plain text, story-driven framework that sits on top of RSpec or Test::Unit providing a business-readable domain-specific language and test automation.

Nicholas is a Ruby on Rails developer and certified (CSM/CSP) Agile web application project manager living in Austin, TX. He has over a decade and a half of experience in web application development working in companies of all sizes: from large multi-national corporations (NTT Communications, Verio, Trion), to mid-sized dot-com start-ups (HomeAway), and a couple of small privately owned businesses.

Spring is here and it’s becoming painfully obvious that I should stop dressing for winter. However, I rock the sandals all year long. Word.

We’re gathering together this month to talk about another Javascript framework for “rich Internet applications” called ExtJS and we’ll also review options for background processing in Rails when you need to pull a long-running task out of the HTTP request/response cycle.

So, SXSW Interactive is over and it was good.

Particularly, I heard that the Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour sponsored by OtherInbox and FiveRuns was good. In years past, we’ve skipped the March meeting because we used to do mid-month meetings and it always coincided with the festival. Now that we’ve adjusted to Fourth Tuesday, we will be having our regular meeting this month. Wow, seeing you guys two times in one month! Remember, you can always come out to Cafe Bedouins to work on your projects on Tuesdays at Thunderbird if you would like as well.

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.

Welcome to 2009!

We’ve got an interesting mix to kick off the year. We’ll go deep into 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 a high-level overview of Django and how it compares with Rails.

Episode 1: Form Essentials (30 minutes)

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.

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!

The weather has turned cool. Finally! Or has it? It’s Fall in Austin…Psyche! I think it was like 90 degrees at Maker Faire today. By the way, here’s a picture of me with R2-D2. Just so you know that we are not only bringing together Ruby and Rails developers, but that we are now reaching out to robots as well. Exciting times.

Meeting Details

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). 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!