Orlando Ruby Users Group

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.

On May 14th, 2009 Tyler Hunt did a presentation on 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.

This meeting was sponsored by Engine Yard, which is now offering cloud hosting services. Engine Yard Solo™ is an inexpensive, web-based platform for on-demand management of your Ruby on Rails web application on Amazon AWS. Usage is fully metered beyond a minimum of $25 per month, so you pay for what you use.

On May 14th, 2009 Thomas Meeks did this presentation on 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.

This meeting was sponsored by Engine Yard, which is now offering cloud hosting services. Engine Yard Solo™ is an inexpensive, web-based platform for on-demand management of your Ruby on Rails web application on Amazon AWS. Usage is fully metered beyond a minimum of $25 per month, so you pay for what you use.

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 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.

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.

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.