Orlando Ruby Users Group

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.

Thanks to those who came out to the meeting last night, we had a great turn out of 31 people, and people seemed to love Panda Express for dinner. =)

Here is Eric Allam’s presentation on Functional Ruby and Jacob Swanner’s presentation on IPhone Apps on Rails as well as his finished demo code.

As acts_as_conference is next month the weekend before the Thursday our meeting would be, I think we’re going to take a month off. So no meeting in February.

If you haven’t registered yet for acts_as_conference what in heaven sakes are you waiting for?

Our next meeting is Thursday, January 10th at Devry sponsored by Veredus. The talks will start at 7 PM, but feel free to show up starting around 6:15 to hang out, chat, and enjoy a free dinner. Also, prior to the meeting a few of us will probably be co-working at Panera in Millenia Mall, so feel free to join us.

First up Eric Allam will be talking about “Functional Ruby”. By exposing some of the well known but poorly understood functional features of Ruby, as well as some of the obscure, we will learn how to write more concise and powerful Ruby code.

Jacob Swanner will then be speaking on “Adding IPhone support to your rails app”. The talk will cover how to detect iphone users, and creating iphone specific views. The talk will focus on how to use the iUI user interface library for iphones.

Thanks to those who came out to the meeting last week. I just posted the video of my Future of Web Services presentation over on the RailsEnvy Blog.

Jason’s presentation should be up a little later this week.