Orlando Ruby Users Group

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!

I didn’t get a chance to count, but I think we had a little over 30 at the meeting tonight.

Here is Thomas Meeks’s presentation on starling and Mike Blake’s presentation on Natural Language

Hope to see some of you guys at other meetings around town this month, there’s Refresh Central Florida next Thursday, Florida Creatives the following Monday, and Orlando PHP the next day on Tuesday.

Check out their websites for more information.

Our next meeting is Thursday, April 10 – 7 PM at Devry room #121, and sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have some delicious Panda Express for dinner.

First up, Thomas Meeks will be giving an overview of Starling. Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter’s backend, and is in production across Twitter’s cluster.

Then Mike Blake will be giving a talk on Natural Language Modeling, creating software from written and verbal requirements. He’ll be talking about getting user participation in the Object modeling proccess, and how object modeling relates to the ruby language. You may have seen him do this talk at BarCamp, but this time it’ll be a little more Ruby centric.

We had about 30 people at the meeting last night, and two great presentations. Nathaniel Bibler’s talk entitled Amazon at Your Service can be downloaded here and Scott Ahten’s talk on CakePHP can be downloaded here.

Don’t forget, BarCampOrlando is just one week away, hopefully we’ll see most of you there.

Lastly, our next meeting is two weeks from today, April 10th, on our normal day (the second thursday of the month). It’ll be a great chance to decompress from BarCampOrlando with the rest of the crew.

Our next meeting is Thursday, March 27th, 7 PM at Devry in Room #121, sponsored by Veredus. We’ll have delicious dinner from Panda Express just like last time, and two talks that you don’t need to be a Ruby expert to understand.

First up, Nathaniel Bibler will be giving an overview of what’s available today through Amazon Web Services (AWS). He’ll give some ideas and tips for working with these services, and how they can increase your productivity, security, and / or bottom line.

Then we’ll have Scott Ahten give a talk on CakePHP for Rails Developers. Topics include: framework conventions, creating models, views, controllers, availability of third-party extensions, and hosting. Even if you’re comfortable in Rails, it will be great to see if we can gleam any new ideas from this popular MVC framework.

Lastly, a few of us are going to be going to the They Might Be Giants concert tomorrow night (Thursday, March 12). I’m pretty sure tickets are still available, so it’d be great to see you guys out.

We’re going to have the next ORUG meeting on Thursday, March 27th, 7 PM at Devry, sponsored by Veredus. There will be a group of us going to the They Might Be Giants concert which is on Thursday, March 13th, which is why the meeting was pushed back. Hopefully see some of you there.

At the meeting on March 27, we’ll have Nathan Bibler and Scott Ahten doing presentations, more info on that in the coming weeks.

Lastly, BarCampOrlando registration is now open, for April 5th and 6th. Sign up at http://www.BarCampOrlando.org. Hopefully see you guys there as well.

I'm happy to announce that Veredus has agreed to sponsor another year of Orlando Users Group Meetings. It's fantastic to see that a local company understands the full potential of the Ruby / Rails community here in Orlando, and is willing to do their part to support the community.

Veredus is still looking for a full-time Rails programmer. Please contact Chris Coddington (ccoddington at vereduscorp com) if you're interested.