Orlando Ruby Users Group

Our next meeting is Thursday, December 11th – 7 PM at Devry Room #106 sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have some delicious Panda Express for dinner at 6 PM, so feel free to show up early for networking and free food.

First up this month is David Rogers doing a talk on Solving the Problem of Distributed Identity with OpenID. David will be explaining the how and the why behind Open-ID and then showing off some Ruby code. This should be quite interesting considering that he’s a PHP guy. ;-)

Secondly, I’ll be running my Scaling Rails talk which is shortly going to be turned into an Envycast. In this talk I’ll start by going over all of the Caching Mechanisms that ship with Rails and how to take full advantage of them. We’ll then move into scaling the database, and best practices for deployment. We should cover all the information needed to confidently deploy a Scalable Rails application in the wild. Even if you’re experienced with Rails, you’re bound to learn a few new tricks.

Just FYI, the Scaling Rails talk may run over the allotted 30 minutes. So feel free to ditch out early if you get tired of hearing me yap or just be prepared to stay a little extra time.

Our next meeting is Thursday, November 13th – 7 PM at Devry Room #106 sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have some delicious Panda Express for dinner at 6 PM, so feel free to show up early for networking and free food.

This month Thomas Meeks will be doing a talk entitled Grace Under Pressure: Nanite. Oftentimes, the key to making an application that can handle a heave load is ensuring that it’s graceful and predictable. Nanite, a brand new project that bills itself as a self-assembling fabric of ruby daemons, provides a great many tools to create applications that act gracefully under pressure. We’ll start off with a few concepts nanite touts, and quickly move into some examples of it handling load spikes and (metaphorically) exploding servers.

After Thomas’s talk, Matt Aimonetti will be doing a talk on Merb, and covering the following topics:

• Merb 1.0 just got released and the Ruby community is excited about having the choice between at least 2 major and stable frameworks. But what does that mean for you?
• Should you use Merb in your next project?
• Is Merb ready for the enterprise world?
• But what about simple projects?
• What are Merb plans for 2.0?

I’ll also be giving away a few free Envycasts, so hopefully see you there.

Much thanks to Matthew Williams for doing a killer talk this evening teaching us how to use Rad to program the Arduino with Ruby. For more information watch this video:

View the photos

Download code for the Barduino

or download the code for the Barduino-tender

Our next meeting is Thursday, October 16th – 7 PM at Devry room #110, and sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have some delicious Panda Express for dinner at 6 PM, so feel free to show up early for networking and free food.

This month Matthew Williams will be talking about Ruby Rad (using Arduinos to control electronic in Ruby). So if you ever wanted to build a robot, or maybe just your own personal electronics, you won’t want to miss this meeting. Matthew will have live demos of his electronics in action which should be fun to see.

If we have time after Matthew’s talk, I might show off some of the new features coming in Ruby on Rails 2.2 which should be coming out in the next few weeks.

BarCamp Tampa Bay is this weekend, I’ll be heading out there Saturday for their dev day.

Our next meeting is Thursday, September 11th – 7 PM back at Devry room #126, and sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have some delicious Panda Express for dinner at 6 PM, so feel free to show up early for networking and free food.

This month James Robertson will be giving us a talk on Seaside, a web framework for developing applications in Smalltalk. If you’re passionate about Ruby or Rails, you should really take a moment to see what’s going on with Seaside. With Seaside’s continuations, integrated development environment, and component isolation you’re bound to learn a few new ideas.

See you there!

We have a meeting next week, Thursday, August 14th – 7 PM, sponsored by Veredus and we’ll be downtown at the library’s Magnolia room (on the 3rd floor). The first ten people at the Brix Bistro at 6 PM get free dinner from Veredus. Yup FREE DINNER. Last time I got a bunch of appetizers, and it was too much food.

At 7:00 PM we’ll be walking from Brix over to the library’s Magnolia room. See this map for both locations.

At this meeting Larry Diehl and Eric Allum will be presenting a talk on “Introduction to Merb”. After Rails, Merb is the most popular web framework for Ruby. While it contains much of the same architecture of a Rails application, it’s safely threadable, ORM agnostic, javascript agnostic, and is less opinionated.

Merb will hit 1.0 in the next month and it’s bound to gain more traction in our community, so this is your opportunity to see what it’s all about.

Our next meeting is one week away, Thursday, July 10th – 7 PM, sponsored by Veredus, but it will not be at Devry. Devry kicked out all of the user groups for the summer (for lack of room), so this meeting we’re doing downtown at the Orlando Public Library, in the Albertson Room which is on the second floor (just go up the stairs, turn left, then take another left, and you’ll see it on your left). Click here for directions to the library.

The Library doesn’t allow food, so at 6:00 PM We will be meeting across the street from the library at Brix Bistro. This is where Tijuana Flats used to be, right next to Crooked Bayou. If you’re not sure where I mean, check out this map for both locations. At 7:00 PM we’ll be walking from Brix over to the library’s Albertson room.

This week I’ll be doing an hour long presentation on Advanced ActiveRecord. As many of you already know, I just started working on some paid screencasts (a la peepcode). This will be a run through of what I have prepared for the screencast, so I could really use your input.

FYI, at 6 PM you can park on the street for free, so I’ll probably look for a spot along Roselind.

Thanks to those who came out the orug this evening, I think we had about 30 people. If you’re looking for the presentations here are Chris Booth’s slides on XSS, and Jake’s slides on Git.

We don’t yet have a venue solidified for our July / August meetings, but I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, and if you’re looking for another Ruby conference to go to this summer, definitely check out the Ruby Hoedown in Huntsville, AL. Locals Robert Dempsey, Jason Seifer, and I will be doing talks there this year.

Our next meeting is less then one week away, Thursday, June 12th – 7 PM at Devry (Room 106) and sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have some delicious Panda Express for dinner as usual, so feel free to show up anytime after 6 PM for networking and food. We have two great talks lined up.

First up, Chris Booth will be doing a talk on Rails Security, talking about everything you need to know to keep your Rails application safe and secure.

Then Jake Swanner will do a talk on Getting to know Git. Talk will be an introduction to Git, and how to use it as a version control system. It will cover how to get up and running with Git, how to interact with a repository, and how Git is being used in the Ruby community.

We’ll probably also do some talking about Railsconf, so hopefully we’ll see you there.

Our next meeting is Thursday, May 8th – 7 PM at Devry room #105, and sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have some delicious Panda Express for dinner as usual, and we have two great talks lined up this week:

First up we’ll have a talk on Agile Demystified by Robert Dempsey from Atlantic Dominion Solutions. You’ve heard all the buzzwords: self-managing team, self-organizing teams, scrum, agile. Come find out what they never tell you – how scrum works and how you can use it to improve your development and have happy customers.

Secondly we’ll have a talk on The TDD in Genetic Programming by Larry Diehl from Izea. A basic genetic programming algorithm based on Koza’s (written in Ruby) will be explained. This will use the simple Ruby Lisp’esque parse tree I presented at BarCampOrlando, and make an analogy between fitness cases in genetic programming and tests in TDD by extending the RSpec testing framework.

See you there!