Yes, we’re back! In May, we will resume our normal meeting schedule. Tim Tyrrell will be your conductor this month.

RailsConf was an a-m-a-z-i-n-g show and it was a real honor to have it in our hometown. I hope you were able to participate in some of the festivities.

Rails as a Backend for Mobile Applications - Mike Bradford

Whether sharing or backing up custom data between users and devices or connecting to an existing web service, mobile apps commonly rely on web-based backends to extend their functionality. In this talk, we’ll delve into the features Rails provides to build a RESTful API specifically for mobile apps, present some common techniques and best-practices, and point out some areas of caution.

Please take a moment and sign up for any events that you are interested in!  Secondly, please tell your RailsConf-bound friends, especially those who are not in Austin, by forwarding this post to them.

Please join us for our Austin on Rails SXSW Bash this Monday night.

Rails geeks unite! We’ll be sharing good conversation, games (billiards, shuffleboard, and darts), cold beverages, and light appetizers while the guys from 500 Startups Console.fm spin some tunes.

We’ll also have a dedicated gaming room to ourselves with an old school game collection including Mission Control, etc. They will also have XBox set up on a large screen for our use.

For February, we are going to address one of the core components of Rails from the very beginning: ActiveRecord. We will have an introduction to the topic as well as a deep dive on more complex data modeling issues. The organizer for this meeting is Mason Hale.

Beginner Talk

Demystifying ActiveRecord — Anthony Lewis

For many new Rails developers, their first exposure to Rails (and often Ruby) is through ActiveRecord and “magical” incantations like ‘hasmany’ or ‘belongsto’. In this talk, we’ll pull back the curtain on ActiveRecord and see what’s going on under the hood. We won’t assume any prior knowledge of Rails or ActiveRecord, but may skim over explaining methods and parameters which are already well documented elsewhere. Instead, we’ll focus on the “big picture”, identifying the main concepts and components and explaining how they fit together.

The organizer for this meeting is Keith Gaddis.

Welcome to 2012! From the looks of things, we are going to have a fantastic year here in Austin.

Beginner Talk

Backgrounding Tasks in Rails - Marcus Mateus

Frequently web applications need to perform tasks which can take far too long to handle in a healthy request cycle. Marcus will showcase a few options for moving tasks into the background, enabling quick responses to site visitors, using libraries like DelayedJob and Resque.

We are incredibly humbled and excited by the selection of Austin, Texas for RailsConf 2012.

Austin on Rails was founded at the end of 2005 by Damon Clinkscales, Rob Rasmussen, and Rob Jones, just as Rails 1.0 was about to release. We’ve been meeting monthly ever since and our membership has grown to 200+ and regularly host meetings of 50-75 developers. We’ve built a strong community here and we are ready to do everything that is needed to make RailsConf 2012 a resounding success.

Austin Web Community Bash

Tuesday, December 13, from 7-9 p.m. Buffalo Billiards (6th and Brazos)

Yes folks, It’s that time of year again! Come on out Tuesday, December 13, 2011, for a year-end gathering with many of the other tech and web meetups from around town.

Catch up with old friends and make new ones. Thanks to our awesome sponsors, we’ll have a sizable bar tab for the night.

This month, we’re excited to be doing a joint meeting with the Cassandra user group here in Austin!

BEGINNER TALK

Intro to Cassandra (And Connecting With Ruby)

Apache Cassandra is a scalable, highly available non-relational database designed to deal with big data in real time. After being open sourced by Facebook, Cassandra quickly became popular with sites like Twitter and Reddit for its ability to handle large volumes of low latency writes and reads while still tolerating node failures without disruption.

This month is all about deployment environments, including a hosted environment such as Heroku, or building your own private cloud with OpenNebula. The organizer for this meeting is Ethan Waldo.

Beginner Talk

From Process Model to Asset Pipeline - Chris Continanza / Deploying Rails 3.1 on Heroku - Terence Lee

In this talk Terence Lee and Chris Continanza of Heroku will take you through how deployment on Heroku works. We’ll start with the Unix Process Model and show how Heroku’s Cedar Platform focuses on deploying with this process model. Then Terence will cover strategies for deploying Rails 3.1 on Heroku and how Heroku makes it work.

Very excited for this month’s meeting! Your tour guide for the evening is Steve Sanderson (@stevesanderson) of Food on the Table.

We are going to have talks from developers at Food on the Table about moving from PHP to Rails and also several days in the life of Rails developers practicing lean startup principles. Founder of Food on the Table Manuel Rosso worked for many years at IMVU, the company which provided the ground for Eric Ries to develop/refine the principles of what it means to be a lean startup. Make sure to pick up a copy of Eric’s book The Lean Startup, which just came out, when you have a chance.