Entries Tagged 'Meetings' ↓

On our July 9th meeting Nathaniel Bibler from Envy Labs did a talk on Building a Video Portal on Rails. I finally got around to editing and uploading the video, which you can see below:

View this video on viddler

Our next ORUG meeting is this Thursday, July 9th, 7 PM at Devry Room 114. A few of us will be meeting at Panda Express for dinner at 6 PM before the meeting for lunch, so feel free to stop by (Panda is right next to Devry, you can’t miss it).

First up we’ll have a presentation by Nathaniel Bibler entitled “Building a Video Portal in Rails, How the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Started Streaming”. Nathaniel did this talk at Railsconf, and he’ll be redoing it for our group. Using a project built for 4Kids Entertainment (http://www.4kidstv.com) as a basis, he’ll talk about technical issues, creative solutions, and many other hurdles involved in building a successful video portal in Ruby on Rails.

Then I’ll be doing a quick talk on “Scaling your Database”. I’ve been working on two new videos for the Scaling Rails Screencast series with this topic, and I thought it’d be fun to run the talk here before I film it. We’ll be talking a lot about Database Replication, Data Sharding, and other strategies for avoiding a database bottleneck.

In the next day I’m going to be talking to Ezra Zygmuntowicz (from Engine Yard), Mark Imbriaco (Sys Admin for 37 Signals), and Mike Perham (author of the Data Fabric gem and the memcached-client gem) to hear about their recommendations for scaling the database. I’ll take their recommendations, and put them into my talk Thursday. Should be interesting!

Hope to see you there. Oh, and I do want to mention that CoLab (http://www.colaborlando.com) is free this Friday if you want to come work with a few other Ruby doods. RSVP here: http://colabfreefridays.eventbrite.com/

I have two meetings to tell you about.

Next Wednesday, June 3rd at 7 PM at CoLab Orlando, we’re going to have a small TDD Dojo with Corey Haines who will be in town for Day of Ruby. Corey, in case you’re not familiar, is the Journeyman Programmer who travels around the country pairing with people. Since he’s quite fluent with TDD, he offered to help us put together an impromptu TDD Dojo (10 minute round-robin ping-pong programming), plus some discussion on good programming practices, and doing BDD in Ruby. I get the feeling beer may happen afterward.

A few of us Rubyists recently rented an office space at CoLab, #604 on the 6th floor. Feel free to come by and see our digs before 5:30 PM, and you can join us for dinner before the meeting. If you get to the meeting late, you may need to call me at 407-754-5517 so I can let you in.

Secondly, our normal meeting will be Thursday, June 11th at Devry (Room 114) starting at 7 PM (6 PM for food and networking). Ed Burns will be discussing highlights of his recently published his book entitled Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers, which is a collection of interviews with some of today’s top programmers. Two programmers in the book you may be familiar with are Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.

We’ll run through the book by looking at a cross section of secrets (aka character attributes) exhibited by the rockstars, listening to audio clips from the actual interviews along the way.

We’re still looking for a sponsor for this meeting, so let me know if you or your company might be interested.

Here to bring you news about the next two Orlando Ruby Users Groups meetings.

May 14th – Hardware Day

Our may 14th meeting will be held back down at Devry room #119, food at 6 PM thanks to sponsorship by Engine Yard. At 7 PM we will have two hardware related talks:

First up, Tyler Hunt will be doing a talk on “Cooking with Chef”. If you’re tired of running the same commands over and over when setting up your servers, you’ll love Chef. It’s a systems integration framework that allows you to use a Ruby DSL to manage your system configurations, and then easily deploy them across your entire infrastructure, à la Capistrano. Tyler will be breaking down the various components of Chef, and showing some example configurations to get you cooking.

Next Thomas Meeks will be doing a talk on “Building your own personal cloud with eucalyptus”. Eucalyptus is an open source cloud infrastructure that is API-compatible with Amazon’s EC2. In this talk he’s going to give an introduction to Eucalyptus, its uses, how to install it, and how to interface with it using the Amazon EC2 gem available on github.

I’ve got a bunch of Engine Yard T-shirts to give away, first come first serve. I’m also going to give away a few copies of Ruby 1.9 – What you need to know, the new envycast with David Black, so hopefully see you at this Post-Railsconf meeting.

June 11th – Rock Star Programmers

Last week I ran in Ed Burns, who lives here in Orlando and works for Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Ed recently published his book entitled Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers, which is a collection of interviews with some of today’s top programmers. This presentation will share some of the things he learned during the creation of the book. Two programmers in the book you may be familiar with are Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.

We’ll run through the book by looking at a cross section of secrets (aka character attributes) exhibited by the rockstars, listening to audio clips from the actual interviews along the way.

This meeting will also be down at Devry (Room 114), and we’re looking for a sponsor, so let me know if you or your company might be interested.

Thanks!

Our next meeting is Thursday, January 15th – 7 PM at CoLab Orlando sponsored by Veredus. We’ll be meeting downtown at 6 PM for food at the The Globe, See this map for locations and free parking. The first 8 people who show up at 6 PM get free dinner.

After hanging at the Globe, at 7 PM we’ll be heading up to CoLab, Orlando’s first official CoWorking space. Once you guys get the grand tour, depending on the number of people we have, I think we may start with a round table to discuss current topics, and then start a Hackfest. The idea is to work on our Ruby Sparing and Kata by creating our own battleship bots. See the instructions here if you’d like to get a head start.

I figure we’ll break up into groups, do some pair programming, and practice our Ruby Ninja Skillz. Should be an educational night if you want to see some live Ruby coding.

You should also know that the doors to CoLab will be locked on the outside of the building, so you’ll want go come join us before 7 PM so we can walk in as a group (and you’re not locked out). If you get there late, you can call me at 407-754-5517 and we’ll send someone down to let you in.

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.

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.

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.