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February 7, 2012

Models, Models, Every Where

Models form the backbone of our applications, but what are they and where to they come from? More importantly, do you have enough models or is your application missing some? Chris will show you how to spot missing models as well as create models with all of the goodies you’ve come to expect from Ruby on Rails. Along the way you’ll be introduced to ActiveAttr which makes it easy to construct models.

About Chris Griego

Chris Griego got started with Ruby through Ruby on Rails in 2005. Chris spends his days developing applications at getaroom.com and his evenings contributing to open source projects such as Mongoid and Capistrano.

Ruby Basics Series: Web Services

Barrett Clark will be continuing the mini-series where we spend 20 minutes diving into a piece of basic Ruby tools and implementations. This month we’ll look at consuming a web service and how to effectively test the implementation.

January 3, 2012

The Path to Ruby: A panel discussion

This month will feature four of our local Rubyists. Karthik Hariharan, Steve Crozier, Curtis Summers, and Greg Vaughn will take part in a panel discussion centered around how they came to and have progressed in software development and Ruby.

This is a great opportunity for people at all points in the Ruby path. Whether you’re just getting started or have been at it for a while, we hope to see you there.

December 6, 2011

Ruby Core and Standard Library Lookin

Barrett Clark will be continuing the mini-series where we spend 20 minutes diving into a piece of the Ruby Core or Standard library. This month we’ll look at rake tasks, script inputs, and logging.

Guarding your Projects

Guard is a command line tool that easily handles events on file modifications. The primary use for guard is to automatically run tests based on changes to source files, but because of its modular nature, it can do much more. We’ll quickly cover typical setup and use, as well as alternative uses, and maybe even write our own guard gem for fun.

About Morgan

Morgan Nelson is a software developer at getaroom.com. getaroom.com connects people to affordable hotel stays worldwide. Morgan has been working with Ruby since 2007, and loves automating everything he can.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/korishev

The Best and Worst of 2011

We encourage you to bring a piece of code you have written this year that you are incredibly proud of (or something you are horribly ashamed of) and share it with the group. This is a great way for all of us to get a glimpse into what we are all working on.

If you’d like to present, plan to spend 5 or 10 minutes talking about your code, the intention behind it, and why you love (or hate) it. Prizes will be given to the Best and the Worst code presented.

November 1, 2011

Opening Act: Ruby Core and Standard Library Lookin

Barrett Clark will be continuing the mini-series where we spend 20 minutes diving into a piece of the Ruby Core or Standard library. This month we’ll look at creating database connections from Plain Ol’ Ruby.

And now for the main event……

Tuesday!! Tuesday!! Tuesday!!
What is event-driven programming?
How do I write event driven applications?
What is EventMachine?

We’ll talk about all this and more. Kids seats are still just FIVE BUCKS!

About Jesse

Jesse Dearing is a developer at Pure Charity. The mission of Pure Charity is to inspire and encourage a movement of generosity by providing a global platform where everyone can engage and make a difference. Jesse has been writing Ruby for 3+ years and favors interacting with the world through HTTP whether that is via HTML or REST.

Twitter: @JesseDearing
Blog: http://jessedearing.com

October 4, 2011

Appetizer: Ruby Core and Standard Library Lookin

Barrett Clark will be kicking off a mini-series where we spend 20 minutes diving into a piece of the Ruby Core or Standard library. This month we’ll look at Test::Unit.

Main Course: Ruby and Salesforce

Raymond Gao will provide an intro and overview into using Ruby with Salesforce. Salesforce is one of the leading CRM solution providers. Chatter (its social networking tool) is a really hot topic. Ruby on Salesforce integration is a relative new topic. I have the fortune of having written the Ruby Toolkit for Salesforce, used at 2010 DreamForce conference. Based on Ray’s personal experience, this approach is probably one of the fastest ways to developing apps, running in the cloud (for example Heroku, Cloud Foundry, or Engine Yard, … ) while leveraging a pre-existing / widely accepted CRM data model. There is already a ~300 people developer community for this technology, around the world.

Main Course (Part 2): CloudSpokes: Cloud Architecture Case Study

Dave Messinger will join us virtually from Philadelphia and intro CloudSpokes. CloudSpokes is one of the hottest places to be right now for the cloud computing community. It lets users win top prizes (ranging $600 – $25,000) and skill badges, while it helps companies / organizations addressing their IT needs in a super lean fashion. Dave will share with us some of the behind the scenes of the sites technical aspects like storing data locally and in Salesforce, as well as how Ruby plays a role in their development strategy.

September 6, 2011

Ruby Newbie Q&A

Do you have Ruby questions that have been keeping you up at night? What are mixins? Why can I find out what happened 4.weeks.ago in Rails? Where should I deploy my next cool app? Should I use MySQL or NoSQL? What is the github all the kids are talking about? How can I get a full-time job programming Ruby and/or Rails everyday? Do I even want that?

With all the new faces that we have been seeing at the Dallas.rb in recent months, we want to take some time and give you a chance to ask those questions and many more. Bring your questions and we will bring pizza, sodas, and answers. Don’t miss chance to get those questions answered.

Not a newbie? Come share your wisdom and experiences. You might even be surprised to learn a new thing or two yourself.

Everyone

We welcome everyone to the Dallas.rb meetings. Come out and ask questions, help answer questions, or just be a part of the conversation. There is always something new to learn!

August 2, 2011

Ruby, Rails, and Winning!

Step inside the world of using Ruby and Rails in the hotness that is Developer Contests. Through my recent experiences we’ll explore:

Contest Logistics: Where do I find these? How do you choose the “right sized” project?
Technical Lessons Learned
After the Deadline: Waiting, coping, celebrating
After the After: What do I do with this thing now?

We’ll actually spend the bulk of the time looking at different technical implementations, exploring projects that hook together several web services into offerings that are cool and hip.

Mark McSpadden

Mark does Ruby and Rails and has for quite a while now. He has recently been on a contest kick and has faired pretty well. In May, his Book Chirpa won first prize in the O’Reilly/Fluidinfo Writable API contest. In July, his Charity Chirpa won the Wildcard category of the Donor’s Choose Hacking Eduction contest. And in late July he won absolutely nothing for his entry into the Evernote Developer’s Competition, Elephant Tracks. He also has a fairly unsuccessful record with the Google Code Jam in 2009, 2010, and 2011.

More about Mark at http://www.markmcspadden.net

June 7, 2011

Beyond Convention Over Configuration: Rails 3 Best Practices

Jesse will be combining what he has gathered from experience, the Code School Rails Best Practices, and a few other talks he has been to.

Jesse Dearing

Jesse Dearing is a full stack web developer with polyglot tendencies. Jesse currently works for Fellowship Technologies, now part of Active Network, reads and writes a lot, and enjoys spending time with his wife and pets.

May 3, 2011

Mixing Persistence Cocktails

Adam Keys will pontificate on the history of growing the Gowalla API and applications, how to work with multiple databases, and how to iteratively work with high traffic apps.

Adam Keys

Adam Keys is a software developer, entertainer and lover of animals. He works at Gowalla, reads a lot, and enjoys cracking wise.

April 5, 2011

Architecture and design of KillerTechJobs.com

Scott will demo and walk through a short overview of KillerTechJobs.com and then talk about some of the reasons he chose Ruby on Rails, the architecture, and frameworks used in the project.

Scott Rosenthal

Scott Rosenthal is the sole engineer that built KillerTechJobs.com and has several years of experience working as an IT consultant with many different companies

February 1, 2011 – Cancelled, due to weather

Toystore, an Object Mapper for Key/Value Data Stores

From Data Modeling in Performant Systems by John Nunemaker:

Keeping an application performant is all about finding bottlenecks and fixing them. The problem is each bottleneck you fix leads to more usage and a new bottleneck. It is a constant game of cat and mouse. Sometimes you are the cat and sometimes, well, you are not.

Most of the time, the removal of those bottlenecks is about moving hot data to places that can serve it faster. Disks are slow, memory is fast, enter more memcached.

Over time, you work and work to move hot data into memory and simplify your data access to fit into memory. Key here, value there. Eventually, you get to a place where you have simplified how you access your data into simple key/value lookups.

At Zynga With Friends, we were looking for ways to leverage some of the new NoSQL technologies without giving up some of the ease of the ORM we had grown used to with ActiveRecord. That is how Toystore was born.

We will take a look at Adapter, a common interface to key/value data stores. After that we will see what Toystore can provide, the reasoning behind it, and the design decisions made along the way.

Geoffrey Dagley

Geoffrey works for Zynga with Friends, creators of Words with Friends and Chess with Friends, where he is responsible for keeping the servers humming for the 2.5M+ daily users of the Games With Friends games.

January 5, 2011

2011 Meetup @ The Londoner

Since it is the beginning of the new year, it was decided that we should all get together to hangout, drink (or not), and talk Ruby and tech in a less formal setting. If you have never been out to a Dallas.rb meeting, this is a great way to come get to know some of the local Rubyists. We are open to anyone and everyone.

December 7, 2010

2010: A Year in Code

Show off your most shameful, as well as the most awesomest, line(s) of Ruby code you wrote in 2010. Be ready to explain your code, why you wrote it, etc. We will vote on our favorites….maybe even have prizes for the winner and the loser.

Create a gist on Github that way we won’t have to mess with switching out laptops. We can use a browser and talk about the code.

November 2, 2010

Mobile Application Development

Mobile Versions of Web Applications

John will talk about what he did to a desktop version of a “simple” CRM so that it renders nicely on the iPhone and the little tweaks to make it “easier” on the phone.

Making Gowalla Go

Adam will talk about the databases and infrastructure that power Gowalla, how the application is deployed, and how developers work with designers to deliver a top-notch web and mobile experience.

Speakers

John Ivanoff

For John Ivanoff, it all stared in 1981 with BASIC and hacking into the main frame to make his friend “absent” from school. In 1996 he found the WWW. Anyone remember Gopher? Around 2003 I discovered web standards and in 2005 gave a presentation on web standards.

He is currently converting a Classic ASP web app to Rails. You can find him on Twitter, @john_ivanoff, and on github, johnivanoff. And on April 30-May 1, he’ll be ridding on the SAM’S CLUB MS 150 Bike Ride. Can he count on your help?

Adam Keys

Adam Keys (@therealadam) is a software developer, entertainer and lover of animals. He’s written software in too many languages to name at startups, small businesses and Fortune 100 giants. His philosophy of coding is to write less code and have more fun writing it. He is currently an expert typist at Gowalla.

Outside of software development, Adam has studied double bass performance, performed standup comedy and written comedy sketches. He and his wife volunteer for Central Texas Dachshund Rescue and reside in Dallas, Texas, with 3 dachshunds and 2 tabby cats.

October 5, 2010

Exploring PostgreSQL

We’ll cover Materialized Views (the basics of denormalization and indexing), LISTEN/NOTIFY (a simple, persistent, reliable queue), Replication (with Bucardo), Windowing Functions (pagination with only one query), functions in general purpose languages (perl), and discuss ways to manage your schema. We’ll also cover basics like, “how much data can a database chuck if a database could chuck data”, and ways to buy the performance you want on the cheap.

Sam Smoot

I’ve been using Ruby since v1.80, close to 7 years. I’ve written and contributed to DataMapper, Harbor, Sequel, Rails as well as various small personal projects. Currently I’m the senior manager at Wieck Media, where we develop sites for Press and Syndication services for clients including Honda, NYTimes, MB-USA, etc. My latest love is shell programming with Bash, and dabbling in networking, virtualization, and enterprise level storage technologies.

September 7, 2010

Potpourri

Redis, Resque, and Background processing – Brian Smith

An intro to using Redis and Resque for all your background processing needs.

How to turn Javascript into web serving awesome! – Kevin Marvin

A brief demonstration of using NodeJS, ExpressJS, MongoDB and EJS to make a web app that screams. We will spend some time talking about:

The difficulty in moving to a new, bleeding edge platform
Using a framework that so closely resembles Sinatra it could be his evil twin
What kinds of performance one can expect from Closure driven development
Hacking Helpers – How to type less and include more

Bios:

Brian is a developer. He likes code and lots of it. He also likes beer, and once again, lots of it. There’s other stuff he likes too. He works on memoryreel.com doing awesome things with apis

Kevin is a professional amateur. Currently the CIO of MODx LLC – the company behind the MODx PHP CMS/CMF, he’s been a systems engineer, network architect, PHP coder, Ruby / Rails coder, and now thinks getting a bloody nose with the latest thing is more fun than anything.

August 3, 2010

Optimizing your Ruby on Rails Web Application

Has your Rails app become a bit pokey, now that you actually have users showing up to your site? Do you miss the days when your app was quick witted, snappy, and the talk of the town?

Then come on down to August’s Dallas Ruby Brigade meetup for a presentation on Optimizing your Ruby on Rails Web Application. We’ll look at server side performance, database query optimization, and client perceived load times.

After a brief presentation on a few of the tools available, we’ll roll up our shirt sleeves and optimize some Real Live Code (sacrificial lambs generously provided by actual DRB members).

Marshall Yount

Marshall (@marshallyount) is a serial monogamist generalist programmer, having “gone steady” with a half dozen different languages and web platforms. There are times when Ruby seems like she might be “the one,” but he hasn’t gotten the gumption to put a ring on that finger. At Yount Labs, Marshall enjoys video streaming, helping startups scale, and long walks on the beach.

July 6, 2010

Rails’ Next Top Model: Using ActiveModel and ActiveRelation

Rails jumped on the scene five years ago in part due to excellent support for connecting database tables to Ruby classes via ActiveRecord. Rails 3 makes two major improvements to this support. ActiveModel makes it easy to turn any old object into one that looks like ActiveRecord to your Rails app. ActiveRelation makes many kinds of queries easier and makes it possible to write some queries that were very difficult in the past.

In this talk, we’ll learn how to build our own model layer using ActiveRelation and ActiveModel. We’ll start by learning how ARel works and how to use it. Then we’ll write an adapter for our own database. Next, we’ll see what ActiveModel provides and how we use it through ActiveRecord. With this in mind, we’ll add functionality to our models that make them look just like ActiveRecord to our Rails app.

In the end, we’ll have a good grasp on the new options for modeling data in Rails 3 and how we can use that to write cleaner apps.

Adam Keys

June 1, 2010

Ruby at the Dallas Morning News

Learn how Ruby and Rails are influencing the world of journalism. Across the journalism world, Python/Django and Ruby/Rails are changing the way we tell stories to the public. Also, I’ll discuss the way Ruby influences our everyday journalism needs with some real world examples.

Ryan McNeill

Ryan McNeill is the computer-assisted reporting editor at The Dallas Morning News. That’s a fancy way of saying he heads data analysis for both short- and long-term stories at The News. McNeill isn’t a computer scientist, but a journalist who learned Perl and then Ruby as a way to wrangle odd data sets. Learning Rails is an effort to find new ways to tell stories. Other geeky things we use in the newsroom: SPSS, ArcGIS, UCINet, SQL Server and MySQL - all in the name of finding stories others don’t.

April 6, 2010

Microformats

Microformats: Most folks love ‘em, hate ’em, or know nothing about them. As a web deveoper, why should I care? We’ll take a look at some examples of microformats out in the wild, and evaluate a couple of ruby libraries, grounded in real world implementation experience on IsItSafeToVisit.

Marshall Yount

March 2, 2010

JRuby

Kevin Marvin

February 2, 2010

CSS Metaframeworks

Everything you wanted to know about CSS meta frameworks but were too scared to ask including:

what the heck is a CSS meta framework?
why should I care about CSS meta frameworks?
who would win in a Sass vs. LessCSS deathmatch?
how do you go about using meta frameworks with Ruby projects?
will I have to give up Dreamweaver?
will I be left saying wow, “that’s so meta!”?
and more!

Wynn Netherland

Wynn Netherland is a freelance web designer and Ruby developer in the Dallas area focusing mainly on front-end UI/UX development. You can catch up with Wynn on Twitter by following @pengwynn or on his blog http://wynnnetherland.com.

January 5, 2010

Robotic Rails

Description: File uploads and writing tests are fairly core to most Rails applications, but they’re also 2 of the things that cause developers the most headache. Taking a glimpse at the thoughtbot Community Tools, you can discover simple approaches to tackle those feats with ease. Paperclip makes file storage easy and efficient by limiting how much code is needed, as well as reducing your database overhead from the bloat of multiple records per image (as seen with attachment_fu). Shoulda consists of test macros, assertions, and helpers that make testing a breeze. Factory Girl provides a framework and DSL for defining and using factories to create data records for ruby test suites. The goal is to be less error-prone, more explicit, and all-around easier to work with than Rails’ fixtures.

Jen Wendling

Jen Wendling is a software developer and graphic designer living in Dallas with her 2 adorable chinchillas. Aside from all things technical, she is an avid food enthusiast, loves to bowl and rocks the greens at TopGolf.

December 1, 2009

Just for Fun

Remember when you started using Ruby? That time when it was fun to tinker with things, write little amusing programs, explore new things. A time that you didn’t worry about the quality of garbage collectors or what lambda syntax is the best. Back when coding was more fun and less serious?

Why not get back to those days? Sure, you can make a pretty good living writing Ruby for monies. But, your inner child, your inner artist, is waiting for you to come out and play, to come out and create.

See what fun other people are up to, discover the fun you might be missing out on, and learn how to have fun even when you do have to write production code for monies.

Adam Keys

Adam Keys is a software developer, entertainer and lover of animals. He’s written software in too many languages to name at startups, small businesses and Fortune 100 giants. His philosophy of coding is to write less code and have more fun writing it.

November 3, 2009

Ruby and Flex :: The Fastest Way To RIA

Ruby is one of the fastest (and most enjoyable) languages to program in for middle tier development. Flex is the fastest (and most enjoyable) front layer development framework. Evaluating AMF and using services provided by Ruby (specifically Ruby on Rails) we will see how Flex and Ruby is the fastest way to develop your enterprise level applications.

Jonathan Campos

Jonathan Campos has been specifically building web applications since 2000 using a variety of tools and languages for many different clients. The technologies include: PHP, MYSQL, POSTGRES, Flash, Flex, AIR, Actionscript, Javascript, and Ruby. Jonathan is currently a Principal Architect at Miller and Associates in Dallas Texas and Co-Owner of UnitedMindset with friend Dimi Arhontidis. Jonathan leads various development teams and advises for multiple companies around the world along with being an active trainer in Flex development.

October 6, 2009

Lightning Talks

YOU will be doing lightning talks on whatever YOU want to show off. Lightning talks are 5-10 minutes of YOU presenting with 5 minutes for people to ask YOU questions. That means we’ll have slots for 7 or 8 of YOU to talk. So start thinking now about what YOU want present. This meeting is all about YOU and the cool things YOU are doing. Are YOU sensing a pattern here?

If YOU are not comfortable presenting, feel free to post ideas back to the mailing list. And if YOU can’t think of anything, maybe YOU can take on one of the ideas posted. There is no reason YOU should feel left out of this meeting :)

We’ll see YOU there.

September 1, 2009

Titanium Platform for Desktop and Mobile Applications

The open-source Titanium platform allows developers to use their existing knowledge of rich web application technologies – JavaScript, Python, Ruby, HTML and CSS – to build desktop and mobile applications. We’ll see a brief overview of the things possible in Titanium, and get down and dirty with some Ruby libraries, to showcase the deep integration we have with the Ruby runtime.

Marshall Culpepper

Marshall (@marshall_law) is a long-time open source hacker with contributions to many projects including Appcelerator Entourage, Eclipse, Webtools, JBoss, JBoss Tools, Hibernate Tools, and Pydev. He is now the project lead for Appcelerator’s Titanium project, which you can find at http://www.appcelerator.com.

August 4, 2009

Software Craftsmanship, Mentorship, and Coding Mentors

Derek Lane and Mark McSpadden will “pair present” a look into this trending topic on the Software Development landscape. We will take a quick overview of the many different facets of Software Craftsmanship and spend a little time focused specifically on Mentorship.

We’ll then explore a Rails project we’ve been working on called “Coding Mentors.” We’ll discuss the project, it’s goals and vision, and some of the hurdles (technical, cultural, and personal) we’ve experienced thus far.

We think this will be a great opportunity for you to:

Get buzzword compliant in the realm of Software Craftsmanship
Understand how Software Craftsmanship can improve your work
Find out how to get started either mentoring or apprenticing in a specific discipline
Learn from our mistakes/challenges in building a “simple” Rails app

Hope to see you there!

Derek Lane

After years of fumbling around with the backyard grill, Derek Lane has recently found his life’s calling as a BBQ Life Coach and a practitioner of all things BBQ. Oddly enough, he has also been known to ply both the art and science of Software Craftsmanship over the last couple of decades as well. Striving to find efficient and productive ways to build software has taken Lane on a journey where he has worn various hats including mentor, coach, architect, strategist, visionary, manager, developer, trainer, and methodologist, all while striving to apply the best technology for the job at hand. He is also a contributor to various projects as an author, presenter, committer, and technical reviewer.

Lane is a big believer in the value of volunteer based communities. This belief led him to start several technology based user groups including the Dallas/Fort Worth Texas MicroJava User Group, the Oklahoma City Java User Group (OKCJUG), and The Next Big JDK Thing User Group in Dallas, Texas. Lane has been active as a member, presenter, and mentor for over a decade at various technology user groups across the Midwest and Southern US. He has also been spotted dispensing his unorthodox and zany presentation skills at various conferences including the nationwide No Fluff Just Stuff Tour, and the Dallas and Tulsa Tech Fests.

Mark McSpadden

Mark is a developer helping the financial services industry find it’s way (securely) into this web savvy world. Since starting on Rails (and Ruby) in 2005, he has benefited greatly from the help, guidance, and contributions of others in the industry. This camaraderie has led to a exploration into Software Craftsmanship and Mentorship and ways to improve these efforts within the Ruby community.

Mark works at The Garland Group on projects like Banktastic and RiskKey and keeps busy “after-hours” with side projects like The CU Filter and the soon to be announced Coding Mentors.

July 7. 2009

Ruby on the Desktop(s)

You yawn when you read about static languages adding dynamic features and frameworks adding Rails-like functionality, but developing desktop applications in Ruby has peaked your interest. Real Ruby solutions are coming to both the Mac and the PC. We’ll look at an application built with both MacRuby and IronRuby to show the state of Ruby on the desktop. We’ll compare the platforms, the UI tools, and the pros and cons of using Ruby in these environments.

B.J. Allen

B.J. Allen is currently an application developer at RD2, Inc, where he works mainly on .NET web and desktop applications for a wide variety clients. While primarily using C# at work, he also began using Ruby in 2006 and takes every opportunity to bring Ruby into his work day.

June 2. 2009

Mongo DB

MongoDB – A document store for Ruby that doesn’t rhyme with ouch

Document stores – A new way of thinking
MongoDB features
Ruby drivers and MongoRecord

Wynn Netherland

Wynn Netherland is founder and Pixel Pusher at Squeejee, an Addison-based Rails shop and makers of good clean fun. Their latest app, Tweet Congress recently won a SXSW Web Award for activism and uses MongoDB for much of its storage.

Presentation slides

April 7, 2009

Ruby Hacking. Again!

After the great response and turnout we will have another hands-on hack night at the Dallas.rb. Come prepared to hack with everyone or just look over someone’s shoulder. You will have a chance to share on any code snippets, projects, or anything else you might have. Don’t have anything to share and just want to hack? Come on and hang out with everyone else. Got questions or need help with a project you are working on? Come out and get some more eyes on it to help you out.

Be sure to RSVP so we will know how many to plan for. The past few meetings, parking has been limited out front, but there is also a garage in the back easily accessible by driving around the south side of the building. Park on the south side of garage (near vacant field) and come into the south building.

March 3, 2009

Ruby Hacking

We will have a hands-on hack night at the Dallas.rb. Come prepared to hack with everyone or just look over someone’s shoulder. We will be looking at tinyrb (http://code.macournoyer.com/tinyrb/), getting Rails apps started fast with Basejumper (http://github.com/gdagley/basejumper), or anything else you might have. Got another project that people would be interested in? Come show it off. Got questions or need help with a project you are working on? Come out and get some more eyes on it to help you out.

February 3, 2009

Share Your Ruby Knowledge

Being part of community is more than just sitting on the sidelines and watching everyone else have all the fun. Come out this month and share one thing (or more) that you have been working on, playing with, or generally think is cool in Ruby. It might be a code snippet or new gem you found. It can be Rails/Merb related (plugins/ apps/ secret cool shortcuts) if that is where you have been spending your days lately.

General guidelines:
- Short topics (5 to 15 min, longer if needed)
- Formal slides are acceptable, but not required

Be sure to reply back to the group if you are planning on attending, even if you won’t be presenting, so we can know how many people to expect.

Feel free to post the topic(s) that you might talk about. If you have something you would like to learn about, post it to the group, in case someone is looking for ideas.

January 6, 2009

Smalltalk

With all the comparisons made between Ruby and Smalltalk and the excitement over the MagLev Ruby VM you might be wanting to know more about Smalltalk. Come and learn more about Smalltalk from James Robertson.

November 11, 2008

Building full-text search into your Rails application

We will be looking at different searching solutions using Ruby. So far we have people presenting on Ferret, Sphinx and Xapien. If you’ve had experience with Solr or another full-text index, feel free to come and share them!

We will have time at the beginning of the meeting for you to share little things that you have found, worked on, or generally thought was cool in Ruby recently.

October 7, 2008

Configuration management of production Rails environments with Puppet

At FiveRuns, we utilize Reductive Labs’s Puppet to manage the deployment
and configuration of our production architecture. In this talk I will
cover:

Basic puppet architecture (puppetmaster, puppet clients)
Basic overview of the puppet descriptor language
Deployment of a rails platform (ruby, gems, rails, mysql, webserver)
Configuration management of a production infrastructure.

Matt Swain

Matt has been a long-time *nix geek and loves trying to automate himself out of a job. He enjoys working very closely with developers on custom applications, and he has been doing exactly that since 2001. A recent veteran of Symantec’s anti-phisihing 24×7 ops team, Matt currently manages Fiverun’s internal and external computing infrastructures.

September 2, 2008

Tactical Design

I’ve noticed that when people try to improve the state of the art of software design, they try to think bigger: big patterns, big principles, discussions about classes and modules and components, layers and tiers. Last year I heard a talk called “Strategic Design”.

But I’ve personally had a lot better luck thinking small.

In this talk, we’ll explore just a few small-scale, tactical design principles, and how they can help you and your team build better systems.

Glenn Vanderburg

Glenn Vanderburg works at Relevance, Inc., where he helps customers build great systems with Ruby. He has been working with Ruby since 2000, and thinking about good design for a lot longer than that. He lives in the Dallas area.

August 5, 2008

Hacks

The plan for tomorrow’s meeting is to hack stuff, together. Here are some ideas:

Hack on the Dallas.rb website. We’re looking to rebuild it with Webby, a neat little static-site CMS written in Ruby. If you’ve got front-end skills, we could use a lot of help here.
Hack on a Ruby Quiz. If you’ve got a favorite, let the list know and we can work on that one.
Whatever project you may already have going.

If you just want to pair with someone else, that works too. I’ll probably float around and try and work a little on the website and the quiz.

July 1, 2008

Oh the Fail I’ve Known

Some things sound like a great idea at the time. Hair bands. Crazy guys with a Casio keyboard. Even the Rails core thought components were a good idea for awhile there. Luckily, we later realize these things are not, in fact, all we thought they were cracked up to be.

Unfortunately, we usually learn these things after you’ve committed to them. Interacting with customers and teammates is hit or miss. Developers have to learn continuously but are left on their own to do so. The side-effects of using some API or feature aren’t often discussed in manuals. So it ends up we usually learn about these things by trying and failing.

Some kinds of experience are hard won. Join Adam Keys as he admits to the most embarrassing albums he owns. Adding to his humiliation, he’ll share the lessons he’s learned the hard way about building applications with Rails. His pain is your gain!

Adam Keys

Adam is a software developer from Dallas, TX. He writes on his weblog, The Real Adam on topics ranging from Ruby to pizza. When not writing bios in the third person, Adam volunteers for dog rescue and as a feral cat caretaker. In general, Adam also likes to make those around him laugh. You’ve been warned.

June 3, 2008

Shoes

Jim Hughes will be sharing information using the Shoes framework.

April 1, 2008

Lightening Talks

We will be opening the floor to anyone who wants to share. Have you had something you were working on, but didn’t need a full meeting to talk about it? Got a new project you want to show off? Find some new Ruby code or library that you think others might find interesting? This is your chance to share it.

Topics can range from 5 to 20 minutes. Let me know if you have a topic that might go longer.

Before This

There were others, but unfortunately we forgot the keep track of them.

Back to Home

Meetings are the first Tuesday of each month, from 7-9 PM.

Just for our enlightenment, an RSVP to the mailing list is appreciated. That way we have a rough idea of the head count to expect.

Mailing List:: Google Group
Twitter:: dallasruby
IRC:: #dallas.rb (irc.freenode.net)
RubyForge:: dallasrb

Dallas Rubyists

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Ruby – The Ruby website.
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