It’s been a while, but we’re back and next Thursday, June 16th and we have two presentations (and FREE DINNER) you won’t want to miss. First up Jacob Swanner will be giving a presentation on CoffeeScript, The Basics. Since Rails 3.1 is going to be adding support for CoffeeScript, now seems like the perfect time to learn about it, if you haven’t already. We will cover what CoffeeScript is, the syntax, and how you’d use it.
Next up Eric Allam will be giving a talk on the Asset Pipeline in Rails 3.1. We’ll discover how Rails 3.1 promotes Assets to a first-class Rails citizen in 3.1, and how the new Asset Pipeline allows you to use new technologies like CoffeeScript and Sass to write cleaner and more maintainable code.
Starting at 6:30 PM we’ll have free food from Gringos Locos, and at 7 PM the talks will start. We’ll be holding the meeting at Envy Labs office (http://bit.ly/envylabs). There should be plenty of free street parking and the elevators are right behind the Corona Cigar company on the corner of Orange and Pine. There should be someone in the lobby to buzz you up for the meeting. If not you can call me 407-754-5517. If you park in the garage and you can’t get up to the 10th floor, come down to the lobby and we’ll buzz you up. If you can use your Ruby skills to hack the elevators, you get extra points.
Next Thursday, March 10th from 6 PM to 9 PM at Voxeo’s board room we will be running Code School‘s Rails Best Practices course. This is a course done in the same style of Rails for Zombies. All skill levels are welcome. Here’s a description:
Although Rails contains many web framework best practices, there are still plenty of ways to create horrible code. Fortunately, as the community has matured many new techniques have been discovered which can help keep Rails apps maintainable. In this 5 part lab we will walk through the most common of these best practices and get some hands on experience refactoring Rails.
This course will be on sale when we release CodeSchool.com, and we could use your help fine tuning it before it goes live. Directions to Envy Labs office (which is right next to Voxeo) with Parking options can be found here: http://bit.ly/envylabs
If you get to the building after 6 PM, you will need someone to buzz you up to the 20th floor. Someone will be in the lobby, so just ask for the Orug meeting and we’ll get you where you need to go. Call me if needed 407-754-5517.
This coming Saturday, October 30th JBCope, his friends, some coworkers, and myself have planned to meet at CloudSpace to go over an entire book on Rails 3.
So, if you know Rails 2 and want to bump up (especially now that gems are starting to require Rails 3), if you don’t know Rails and are willing to spend 8 or so hours and one day of this weekend learning, or if you know Rails 3 and want to help instruct, come out this weekend, sometime between 9am and 7pm at Cloudspace (http://goo.gl/2yzX).
More details will follow, including a link to the book (preferably one of the freely distributable online books), food selections, and a schedule.
Do you or any of your friends need to start learning Ruby on Rails? Next Thursday (September 9th) from 7 to 9 PM at CoLab Orlando will be a great opportunity. See this map for parking options.
We’ll have free mexican food and networking at 6 PM, then starting at 7 PM Eric Allam and I will be teaching an Intro To Rails course entitled “Rails for Zombies”. Rails for Zombies is unlike any other code training course you’ve ever been to. We have developed an application using Rails 3 that lets you try coding in Rails, without needing anything installed on your computer. All you’ll need to bring is a laptop with Wifi, and craving to code.
To prepare for the course, we highly recommend you spend some doing the 15 minute tutorial on TryRuby.org, so you can get familiar with the Ruby language.
It’s been a while and I apologize for not staying on top of it (business has been good at Envy Labs), but our next meeting is going to be next Thursday, August 12th, 7 PM at CoLab Orlando, see this map for parking options. We have one talk and two discussions lined up:
First up Jacob Swanner will be doing a talk titled “Webmachine – the web framework you didn’t know existed”. Webmachine is written in Erlang, but don’t let that get you down. It has some really cool features, it’s easy to understand, and Erlang can be a lot of fun. We’ll go over how to get started with Webmachine, helpful resources and debugging tools, as well as how it can play well with Ruby/Rails apps.
Next up Caike Souza will talk about his experience at Oxente Rails 2010, Brazil’s largest Rails conference where he was doing his Refactoring talk. I’m hoping he’ll share with us what the Rails community looks like in Brazil, and maybe teach us about what he learned. At the moment I’m up near Jacksonville for Bizconf, and at the meeting I’ll give a summary of the conference . I’ll share some of the most interesting tech biz topics from the top Ruby/Agile tech shops.
Also I want to make sure you know about Robert Dempsey’s Rails/Software Craftsmanship conference, Acts As Conference taking place October 28-30. Tickets are on sale for $395, though you can get $100 off by using the discount code “qrcodesarethecoolestthingever”.
Our next meeting is one week from today, Thursday, May 13th. 7 PM at CoLab Orlando, see this map for parking options. At this meeting Jacob Swanner and I will be running the Rails 3 workshop that the Envy Labs team will be presenting at Railsconf in June.
So if you’re ready to get your hands dirty and start using some of the beautiful code that Rails 3 has to offer, this is your opportunity. To prepare for the meeting you will need to follow the instructions below:
If you’re on OSX Please install RVM if you don’t have it already installed. Once you follow the directions there to get it up and running, install Ruby 1.9.2-head. i.e. “rvm install 1.9.2-head”
If you’re on Windows you may want to look at “Pik” to get Ruby 1.9.2 head running. However we have not tried to use Pik, so I’m not sure we’ll be much help if you need to troubleshoot. If you can’t get Pik running, you might be okay anyways.
If we have time afterwards I’ll show some of the video I recorded with Yehuda Katz & Carl Lerche talking about some of the intricacies of Rails 3.
Our next meeting is going to be Thursday, April 15th, 7 PM at CoLab Orlando. For directions to CoLab, and free parking options see this map. . We have two talks lined up:
Rodney Degracia will be doing a talk titled Rails and iPhone/iPad where you will learn to extend the codebase of a simple Rails app to exchange data with a native iPhone/iPad app. We will talk about the architecture of the extended Rails app and how to build a mobile API for iPhone/iPad without contaminating the code of the existing Rails App. Lastly we’ll look at the required Objective-C code to consume data from the Rails app and do a live demo of the code in action!
At the moment I’m at the Ruby Nation in DC, where I just gave a talk entitled Deciphering Yehuda. If there’s time after Rodney’s talk, I’ll present this and walk you through some of the advanced Ruby techniques used to refactor Rails over the past year.
If for some reason you get to the building after 7 PM and the front door is locked, feel free to give me a call at 407-754-5517.
The next ORUG meeting will be part of the first Orlando Code Dojo. This event will be held one week from today, Thursday, December 10th, 7 PM at CoLab Orlando. Are you up for the challenge?
Here is what to expect:
7:00 to 7:15 – Introduction and team forming
At the start of the meeting teams will be formed. In order to facilitate
the group formation, we’ve created a google doc so you guys can sign up for
the language you’re interested in for this session. Your choice should not
be based on performance, memory usage or anything like that. It’s just a
matter of what you feel like coding in. You’re also free to change your mind
in case you see someone suggest a language you might be interest in
learning.
I will be the challenge master for this meeting and do a quick
presentation of a code challenge, and give everyone access to a git repo
where they can fork to get started on the project. The git repo will also
contain detailed instructions on the challenge itself. Don’t worry if you
don’t know Git, there will be plenty of people to help if you don’t know it.
Just be sure you have git installed on your machine if you want to program
on it (http://git-scm.com/).
7:30 to 8:30 – Make the Codez
Each team will attempt to get as far as they can in the challenge,
keeping in mind that quality matters over completeness. Writing tested code
is recommended but not required, and aspiring to do TDD is certainly
something worth your time.
8:30 – Code Checkin
Everyone will checkin their code into git, let us know if you need help
doing so. Since everyone will fork from an initial repo, that means
everyone will be able to quickly access everyone else’s solutions (after
8:30, and later at home).
8:30 to 9:00 – Present your codes
Based on github checkins I’ll call one team up at a time to give a 3-5
minute walkthrough of how they solved the problem on the projector. Be
warned that you’ll be using my computer to show your code on github. Having
to switch computers on the projector takes too long, and this means you MUST
have your code checked in to present.
9:00 – All Done & Retrospective
We’ll wrap up and have a retrospective on the dojo itself, collecting
ideas on how to make the DoJo better.
Feedback is most definitely welcome, and please do us a favor and send
this email to a few people to spread the word.
Next Thursday, November 12th at 7 PM is our next meeting taking place at CoLab Orlando downtown. CoLab recently refurbished the shared working space so user group meetings are MUCH more doable. Envy Labs will be sponsoring the meeting with free food at 6 PM. See this map here for directions. Aside from free street parking I should have additional parking info in the email I send out the day before the meeting, so be sure to subscribe to the ORUG announcement list if you have not.
At 7 PM I’ll be doing a presentation titled On The Edge of Rails Performance. This is the same talk I presented at Aloha On Rails and the Rails Summit Brazil last month. Here’s the description:
Earlier this year I released a series of screencasts showing that rails ships with all the tools needed scale your rails app. Since then more Rails applications have gone into production, additional techniques have been developed for optimizing performance, and more open source libraries have been published. In this talk I’ll be showing a bunch of screencasts from these libraries and showing how they make it THAT much easier to Scale Rails.
If for some reason you get to the building after 7 PM and the front door is locked, feel free to give me a call at 407-754-5517. After the meeting we’ll have a discussion about future meetings and how we can bring more code practice into our group. If it’s important for you to become an expert programmer, then you may want to join us for this brainstorming session.
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:
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