Orlando Ruby Users Group :

Next Meeting November 12th

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:59:00 -0800

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.

See you next week!

Next Meeting September 10th

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:02:00 -0700

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.

Building a Video Portal on Rails

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:42:00 -0700

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

Meeting August 13th

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:38:00 -0700

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 New Jersey Intro Course

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:48:00 -0700

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

Meeting July 9th

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:46:00 -0700

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/

TDD Meeting, and Normal Meeting

Wed, 27 May 2009 11:32:00 -0700

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.

Cooking with Chef

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:29:00 -0700

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.

Download Video (29 MB)
Format: MP4 / Apple TV
Duration: 14 minutes

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.

Eucalyptus, Your Personal Cloud

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:16:00 -0700

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.

Download Video (80 MB)
Format: MP4 / Apple TV
Duration: 21 mins

Next Meetings May 14th / June 11th

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:49:00 -0700

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!