Greeting Rails Aficianados!

Your conductor for the month is none other than Mr. Michael May.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s versatile platform-as-a-service offering. It provides developers with all the infrastructure necessary for running modern web applications. With services like Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks, it’s now easier than ever to get up and running on this flexible platform. For this talk I’ll take you step by step through the shortest path to get your Ruby on Rails application running on AWS. I’ll then follow up with a discussion of tools and best practices advice for scaling your application as it grows.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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)

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Back in the saddle after the holidays and what has blown into town? Cedar pollen! Good luck out there folks…Looking forward to seeing you all again this month. We’re going to talk video games and telephony in Ruby. Should be a hoot.

Writing Video Games in Ruby with Gosu - Mason and Garrett Hale

Writing video games in Ruby is a heck of a lot of fun and surprisingly easy. In this session you’ll learn everything you need to know to start writing your own video games using the awesome Gosu library. We’ll build a simple 2D game and cover all the basics of event loops, animation, collision detection, game controller support and audio and video effects along the way. Be sure to bring your laptop to play (or build) along. By the way, this is a great session for kids who are interested in getting into programming.

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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.

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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.

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Railsconf 2010 Recap

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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.

Update: Michael Bernstein will not be speaking this evening. Continue reading »

Due to the the Thanksgiving holiday our meeting has been moved up this month to November 17th. We’ve got an awesome meeting this month and we hope you can make it out!

Many people who love git have a tendency to get excited by the internals of it; how it does the things that make it so great. For the uninitiated, these details can be intimidating and more than a little opaque. We’ll look at a (very) brief over-view of what git is and isn’t, then get to the more important question to the working developer: “How do I use it?” We’ll look at commonly used commands, discuss various work-flows, and compare and contrast subversion’s ways of doing things. The focus will be on how to get things done, not how does git work.

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We’ve got a treat for you this month which is a little bit off the beaten path for us…a talk on MacRuby. It’s definitely a Ruby topic which has a lot of interest in our community, nonetheless.

MacRuby

Ruby is not only a great language for doing web application development, but is garnering great fanfare recently as an new tool for doing full blown applications development for desktop client software as well. Tools like IronRuby on the PC and MacRuby on the Mac make the task of writing a desktop application as fun if not more fun than doing web apps and with many of the same advantages. In this talk we look at MacRuby and how it can be used to create full blown Mac desktop apps while using and talking to many of the same libraries and tools you use to do web apps with Ruby. 

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This month is all about you. We’re interested to know what you have been building, what have you learned lately, etc. Is there a neat little class you made or a trick you found?

Please step up and share something with the group!

We’ll also be hearing from Ross Andrews about his recent play with the Dhaka Parser Generator for Ruby. Using Dhaka, we will go through building a lexer, parser, and evaluator for a small query language. Then we’ll tempt the demo gods and show a Rails application with a search system that utilizes our new language. No previous knowledge of lex/yacc is required, although a basic understanding of BNF and how a parser works is recommended. Ross Andrews is a Rails developer in Austin. He works for the SuperPoints Network, making Rails and Facebook applications

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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!

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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!

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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!

Ike may not have brought us rain but it has fortunately ushered in a trifecta of Ruby talk goodness this month. We'll hear what OtherInbox has been up to, learn how to build a Facebook app with Rails, and get a Ruby primer on the hottest new protocol on the web: XMPP.

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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!

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Greetings Austin Railers

Another hot Austin summer is in full swing and we've got another smokin' meeting for you to boot! Except this time, you are the star. Yes folks, it's true...it's time for another round of lightning talks where you tell us what's up. In addition, we've got some boys from College Station (that hotbed of crackling technological firepower) coming down to give us a preview of their Lone Star talk on Merb, the most popular of the Rails alternative Ruby web frameworks.

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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!

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.

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ORM Deathmatch!

by Mike Perham

ActiveRecord isn't the only game in town when it comes time to access your database with Ruby. We'll take ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel, put them in a steel cage match to the death and see who emerges victorious. Attendees in the first three rows might get bloody so bring a poncho.

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We’ll be meeting again at Datran Media at 7th & Brazos in the Omni Hotel building. We’ll gather by the elevators and shuttle up to the meeting room as we did in January. Please try to arrive by 6:30 so we can get everyone upstairs and start the meeting on time. The meeting will run from 7-9PM with socialization practice afterwards. This month, we’ll be exploring a couple of supporting technologies to Rails, the PostgreSQL relational database and git, a distributed revision control system.

Guyren Howe will be presenting a talk called PostgreSQL Instead, in which he will discuss why he considers Postgres to be a much better database than MySQL. MySQL is a prominently used Rails database so it will be interesting to hear about the benefits of Postgres.

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

After a 2-year history of meeting at Frog Design (thanks!), we’ve got new digs for Austin On Rails! We will be meeting a few blocks over at Datran Media at 7th and Brazos. The meeting room is actually on the 8th floor of the business tower of the Omni Hotel building. The elevator requires a keycard, so we will have to shuttle folks up as they arrive. For this reason, I am going to suggest that people show up at 6:30PM and meet at the elevators just inside the building at the corner of 7th and Brazos. This will give us adequate time to get upstairs and get set up for the meeting. The meeting will run from 7-9PM as per usual. I’d like to thank Josh Baer of Datran Media for offering up a conference room for Austin on Rails.

Ruby and Rails Support in NetBeans IDE 6.0

The NetBeans IDE was originally created as a tool for Java developers. For quite a while now, however, it has had support for other programming languages. In version 6.0, the NetBeans IDE added support for yet another language: Ruby and its framework Ruby on Rails. The features include a powerful editor, refactorings, hints and quick fixes, a gem manager, an interactive shell, a full-featured debugger, and more. This presentation includes numerous demos that illustrate the productivity boost you can get by using NetBeans IDE 6.0 as your development environment for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications.

Gregg Sporar has been a software developer for over twenty years, working on projects ranging from control software for a burglar alarm to 3D graphical user interfaces. His interests include user interfaces, development tools, and performance profiling. He works for Sun Microsystems as a Technology Evangelist on the NetBeans project.

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Howdy Folks

This month we're going to have a product demonstration of ActionItem, a social tasking application developed by a local Rails startup. Mark Roberts and Guy Howe will be delivering the presentation.

Mr. Roberts, president of ActCentric Corporation, is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of progressive management, sales, and technical experience in information technology, with a special focus on open systems enterprise storage. Guy Howe is a primary developer on ActionItem, which is implemented in Ruby on Rails.

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We are having an introductory Ruby and Rails workshop the night before the Lone Star Ruby Conference. Admission to the workshop is for you to make a donation to one or more of the charities we are supporting:

• Habitat for Humanity
• Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Muscular Dystrophy Association
• Capital Area Food Bank
• Ruby Central

We’ve already raised over $800 in the first week, which is wonderful, but we are far from our goal of $2500. We would greatly appreciate your support with these endeavors. The speaker list for the evening workshop (9/6, 6-10PM) is as follows:

• hal fulton - ruby overview
• james edward gray ii - blocks
• bret pettichord - testing in ruby
• marcel molina, jr - why i <3 ruby
• bruce tate - rails overview
• bruce williams - taming your views
• rick olson - active record for the masses
• robert rasmussen - 30 minutes rails live demo

We can’t wait to get everyone together for this event.

Please join us! Thank you.

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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.