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This morning Envy Labs released Rails for Zombies, which is the all online version of the tutorial we ran at the Orlando Ruby Users group a few weeks ago.  If you’re new to Rails this is a great way to give it a try!

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”.

Hopefully see you next Thursday!

Our next meeting will be this Thursday, February 11th, 7 PM at CoLab Orlando. For directions to CoLab, and free parking options see this map.

This meeting we will be having a “Rails 3 Hackfest” starting with a small talk from Nathaniel Bibler and I from Envy Labs. Last week we took a trip out to Engine Yard in San Francisco to meet with Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche, two of the core developers with Rails 3. We grilled them on all sorts of Rails 3 topics to do research for some screencasts we’re working on. At the ORUG meeting Thursday Nathaniel and I will talk through some of the core features of Rails 3, and perhaps show some video we took in SF interviewing Yehuda and Carl.

Following the presentation we will be having a small Rails 3 Hackfest so everyone can have an opportunity to play around with some of the new features and get support if needed.

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.

At our last Orlando Ruby Users Group, Carlos Souza (a.k.a. Caike) did a talk on “Refactoring Ruby”, and Tim Rosenblatt was nice enough to video the talk. If you weren’t there I highly recommend you watch it, there’s some great knowledge and code examples.

Refactoring – ORUG – January 14, 2010 from Tim Rosenblatt on Vimeo.

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Our next meeting will be one week from today, on Thursday, January 14th, 7 PM at CoLab Orlando. For directions to CoLab, and free parking options see this map.

This month Carlos Souza (a.k.a Caike) will be doing a presentation on Refactoring. Code written once, will be read hundreds of times. A program’s source code that does not reflect the knowledge acquired by the developers on the domain will naturally decay. It will most certainly be very hard to test and have all sorts of code smells. Refactoring helps keep code from turning into a mess, making it expressive enough not to cause any trouble in case you – or others – need to go back to it later in the project cycle. It also helps you review your design decisions and it is a very important step into an evolving architecture.

As far as dinner is concerned, we do not yet have a sponsor (any takers?). If we don’t have a sponsor then I’ll let you know where the Envy Labs crew will be grabbing dinner beforehand.

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 starting to organize for BarCamp Orlando. If you’d like to be part of the team that produces BarCamp Orlando this year, you’ll want to join us around 8 PM.

It’s that time again, and this month we’re joining forces with the Adobe Users Group to bring you a talk on “Flex, Rails, and RubyAMF” with Adogo’s Brian LeGros and Orug’s Jake Swanner. The meeting will be Thursday, September 10th, 7 PM at Devry room #114.

For this presentation Brian and Jake be showing a simple Flex application built to integrate with a Rails service using data from Yelp! They’ll show how easy it is to integrate Flex with Rails via XML, JSON, and AMF with out the need for anything fancy. The AMF integration is being provided by RubyAMF, which is a plug-in for Rails, and an easy way to offer the AMF support. They’ll also be giving a brief introduction to the Flex framework, so newcomers are welcome.

Also wanted to mention that Rubyconf tickets go on sale next Friday. Rubyconf is being held November 19-21 at the San Francisco Airport.

Our next meeting is Thursday, August 13th, 7 PM at Devry room #114 and we’ve got two great talks lined up. The Envy Labs crew will be meeting for dinner at 6 PM at Panda Express across the screet from Devry if you wish to join us.

First up Rodney Degracia will be giving a talk on Writing a game world for Rubyists. A detailed look at writing a shared simulation, written in Ruby, for Rubyists to chat, share objects, and programmatically extend in real time. We will discuss the design/security challenges of building the system, along with a short demo.

Next up Greg Pederson will be giving An Introduction to BrowserCMS. BrowserCMS is a rewrite of a commercial Java content management system in rails. We’ll take a look at what BrowserCMS can do with a hands on approach.

Looking forward to hangin with you guys at the meeting, hopefully see you there.

David Black asked me to pass on word about one of his courses Introduction to Ruby, a fast-paced four-day Ruby class, taught by him and Erik Kastner. Here’s the info:

September 14-17, 2009
Hosted by: Exceed Education, Edison, NJ

Early bird price (through August 30): $1600
Regular price: (after August 30): $1750

More information and registration at: http://rubyurl/vmzN, or contact
David at dblack@rubypal.com

Our next meeting will be March 19th, and we’ll have a presentation from Voxeo. Voxeo is a local company which creates enterprise Voice over IP services, and they’ve invited us down to their offices to show off their brand new Ruby API. During this talk they’ll demonstrate how to use Ruby for everything from conferencing and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to Instant Messaging bots and SMS self service. Pretty cool!

We’ll be meeting downtown at Urban Flats at 6 PM for dinner sponsored by Voxeo, and at around 7 PM we’ll be taking the elevators up to Voxeo’s offices in the building. If you show up after 7 PM you’ll need to give us a call to let you in (407-754-5517).

Ignite Orlando March 4th

Next I wanted to let you guys know about Ignite Orlando taking place one week from today, Wednesday, March 4th – 7 PM at Slingapours. If you have a short attention span like I do, you’ll love the 5 minute talk format. Take a look at the awesome talks we have lined up, and register at http://www.igniteorlando.com

David Black Ruby dinner – March 9th

David Black will be in Orlando in 2 weeks, and I figured it might be nice to have a Ruby dinner March 9th for whomever is interested in joining us. We’ll be eating somewhere in the Waterford Lakes area in East Orlando, probably around 6 PM. If you’re interested in joining us please send me an email (Gregg at RailsEnvy.com), and we’ll figure out the details from there.

BarCampOrlando – April 18th

BarCampOrlando is scheduled for April 18th. For more information and to register for free check out http://www.barcamporlando.org.

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