Austin On Rails: Tag rails

Meeting: Tuesday, August 26th @ 7-9 pm

Damon Clinkscales — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:25:00 -0700

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!

Crossing State Lines on Rails

Donald Wilde got into programming from a desire to control his trains as a kid. He never has gotten around to doing that (though he's helped his Dad do so), but he's programmed just about everything else from wire handling machinery to voice-operated VCR controllers. Since 1997, he's been involved with web programming and FOSS as a contributor and a consumer.

State Machines have been a cornerstone of systems design for a lot longer than transistors and the Gang of Four. After a rapid tour of the basics to get you thinking, we'll get into the meat of the presentation: an examination of two different Ruby implementations with practical demonstrations in a Rails environment. Don will leave you inspired to consciously add state machine design to your Controller toolbox and point you to starting points for learning more.

DataMapper: Tomorrow's ORM Today

The boys from Bryan are back and this time their talking about DataMapper, an ORM modeled after that other pattern by Martin Fowler. DataMapper is an alternative to ActiveRecord with some lofty goals of its own. Fast, thread-safe, and feature rich, DataMapper would be downright enterprisy, if it weren't for all the innovation they're cooking up. DataMapper is a primo example of an ORM that has evolved beyond the typical relational database setup.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. They use Merb + DataMapper as their primary web stack on all new projects.

Come on out and join us!

Meeting: Tuesday, July 22nd @ 7-9 pm

Damon Clinkscales — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:23:00 -0700

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.

Meeting Location

Datran Media - 7th & Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators. head to the 8th floor) Always good to arrive early to get a spot!

Lightning Talks!

For our first segment this month, we are going to open up the floor for lightning talks, so please start thinking about what you would like to share now. :-) We'll allow for 5 minutes or so per speaker, but no more than 10, and we'll fit in as many as we can. Good ideas for a talk might be a tool or technique you've learned recently, a new Rails project you've developed, a brief tutorial on a process or library you've found helpful. Etc! Should be fun.

Merb: The "Came for Rails, Stayed for Ruby" Framework

Merb is the pocket rocket framework that's creating buzz in the Rails community. Merb is fast. Merb is modular. Merb is efficient. And Merb might be the best choice for your next project. And it might not.

This presentation will provide an overview of the philosophy behind Merb, the 0.9 rewrite, where Merb is headed, and how it can compliment Rails. We will quickly dive into checking out Merb's internals, a few Merb plugins, and how you can get involved in the Merb project. Merb is a great example of a ruby project done right, and we'll highlight a few features that Merb knocks out of the park while helping your determine if merb is right for you.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. Since April 2008, they have been using Merb + DataMapper on new client applications.

In Other News

I've got some good news on the book front. At RailsConf, I made a connection with Pearson and they've sent me their Ruby Professional Series. This includes The Ruby Way and The Rails Way. So look out for some good book giveaways! I've also got versions for the library, so if somebody wants to borrow one, let me know.

Your monthly socialization practice will follow the meeting at B.D. Riley's pub.

Look forward to seeing everyone at the meeting. Glad to be back!

Upcoming Events

As a side note, there are a couple of Ruby/Rails related events coming up here in Austin that you might want to register for:

Rails Bootup (August 2nd) - if you are newer to Ruby on Rails and would like to get up and running, check out this bootcamp that I am putting on with the help of some of my esteemed colleagues. Why not speed up your learning and spend a Saturday learning Rails?

Lone Star Ruby Conf (September 4-6) - this was a killer show last year and it looks to be a good one this year as well. And they've got Matz, the creator of Ruby, speaking at the conference!

Meeting: Tuesday, June 24th @ 7-9 pm

Damon Clinkscales — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:08:00 -0700

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.

Meeting: Tuesday, April 22nd @ 7-9pm

Damon Clinkscales — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:39:00 -0700

Howdy Austin Railers!

This coming Tuesday will be our first time on our new schedule (4th Tuesdays), which was selected by our membership as the best night for us to gather.

We are are going to bring together two tastes that taste great together, Bootstrapping and Rails. We'll have two of the leaders in Bootstrap Austin (Bijoy and Edward) giving talks on bootstrapping and we'll be discussing how working with Rails can help you get that side project or software startup idea out of your brain and into the browser. We are also fortunate to have two bootstrappers, Damon Flowers and Dave Wolpert, sharing a brief overview of what they are bootstrapping, how it is going so far, and what tools they are using to build up their sites.

Bijoy Goswami develops universal models that help individuals and organizations unlock their fullest potential. He packages these models in stories, books, communities, training and web sites. A consummate evangelist for his various projects, he has been featured in local and national media.

Edward Cruz's day job is working as a grizzled IT veteran specializing in e-commerce implementations. His passion is in finding ways to extend current web technologies into everyday human endeavors in ways that are collaborative, cooperative, and progressive. His latest project, Molecular Thinking (http://www.molecularthinking.com), is an accidental web 2.0 site that enables collaborative online brainstorming and ideation.

Here's the rough agenda for Tuesday (with a little twist on our usual format):

7:00-7:10 Welcome and Announcements
7:10-7:35 Bootstrapping 101 - Bijoy Goswami, Aviri/Bootstrap Austin
7:35-7:45 Damon Flowers, Dwellgo - Overview/Feedback
7:45-7:55 Dave Wolpert, PubMaven - Overview/Feedback
7:55-8:05 BREAK / GIVEAWAY

8:05-8:30 Bootstrapping With Rails - Edward Cruz, Molecular Thinking/Bootstrap Austin
8:30-8:55 Meet and Greet (People Mashup - connect with bootstrappers in Austin)

I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about bootstrapping and how we as a group can help each other and others harness the power of Rails to create!

The meeting will be held at Datran Media at the corner of 7th and Brazos. Please try to show up around 6:30 so that we'll have time to get everyone shuttled upstairs. We'll meet at the bank of elevators just inside the door. Socialization practice to follow afterwards at a local pub.

Looking forward to seeing everybody!

Note: If you are interested in bootstrapping and you haven't yet watched DHH at Startup School 2008, you totally should. Turn comments off, though. You'll see what I mean. ;-)

Meeting: Tuesday, February 12th @ 7pm

Damon Clinkscales — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:22:00 -0800

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.

Guyren Howe is an Australian who consults here in Austin on databases, web applications and desktop applications (using PHP, Rails, and REALbasic mostly) for Relevant Logic, LLC. He is one of the developers of Actionitem.com.

Rein Henrichs will be presenting a talk on the git revision control system. git, a new and wildly popular version control system written by Linus Torvalds, is the best thing since a series of tubes. Its design philosophy promotes good developer habits and its simple interface helps teams large and small spend less time managing their code and more time writing it. Learn what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to simplify your development workflow for a happier and more productive team.

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.

Finally, I'd like to announce that for our March meeting, we are co-hosting the Austin On Rails SXSW Happy Hour with FiveRuns. FiveRuns has been kind enough to foot the bill for the extravaganza and all signs point to w00t!

The Rails party will be held in the evening of March 10, 2008 in the new Buffalo Billiards Recreation Room, which includes multiple video game consoles, among other games. You do not have to be a SXSW attendee to come to the party, but you will need to RSVP to FiveRuns to get your name on the list.

Intro to Ruby and Rails Workshop - September 6, 2007

Damon Clinkscales — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:00:00 -0700

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.

NOTE: Lone Star Ruby Conference pricing goes up after August 10th to $300. You can save $100 by registering this week!

Meeting: Tuesday, August 7th @ 7pm

Damon Clinkscales — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:57:00 -0700

Greetings Austin Railers,

We're going to do a 1-2 combo punch this month with some more introductory Rails material as a warmup to some very interesting details from the S3 implementation at 37Signals.

Edward Cruz has signed on to continue his talk from last month leading us deeper into the Rails rabbit hole.

Marcel Molina, Jr. will lead us through his OSCON 2007 talk about his experiences implementing S3 at 37Signals. In the fall of 2006, 37signals moved all the uploads they had on their Basecamp and Campfire applications to S3. Migrating around five million files revealed a set of unexpected challenges. In the end, going with S3 was a big win, but it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed at the outset. This talk will go over what questions you'll have to answer and issues you'll have to deal with when moving your infrastructure over to S3 that you might not have expected.

David Bluestein will be emceeing the meeting this month.

So please come on out and join us on August 7th from 7-9PM at Frog Design (8th and Congress). Beverages and what not to follow at Hickory Street.

Austin On Rails SXSW 2007 Happy Hour

Damon Clinkscales — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:04:00 -0800

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] [at] [pobox.com] to RSVP for entrance to the party.

Meeting: October 10, 2006 @ 7PM

Damon Clinkscales — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:24:00 -0700

The Deal

This month, we're going to combine two tastes that taste great together...Rails (the chocolate) and Entrepreneurship (the peanut butter).

A lot of us probably have business ideas and we wonder if we should pursue them. But is a good idea enough? How will your business make money? Do you need funding? If you can't do everything on your list, how do you find good people to help you achieve your goals? This meeting is intended to get the conversation about Austin-based Rails projects going, bring people together, and spur people to action.

Meeting Details

Frog Design at 8th/Congress

7PM - 9PM

Our Speaker

Matt Cohen is a Reese's Cup: a business technologist. He is an entrepreneur, consultant, and a Venture Fellow at G-51 Capital, a seed and early stage venture capital firm founded in Austin in 1997. At G-51, he evaluates investment opportunities and provides technology management support for G-51's portfolio companies. He has consulted with companies nationwide on technology and business strategy, was Senior VP of Operations and CTO for New Century Network (NCN) in New York (a content and advertising network of over 150 online newspapers), and co-founded HoustonChronicle.com in 1994. He has a CS degree from Rice University, loves Ruby and Rails, and knows the reason for /dev/zero.

Hour One

Matt will talk about the business side of your Rails project: its business potential, revenue options, and possible funding sources.

Hour Two

We are going to open up the floor to anyone who is interested to pitch a Rails-based business idea you've been thinking about, getting feedback or soliciting help from Austin-based designers, coders, and entrepreneurs. Matt will offer his perspective on the pitches as well.