How I Roll: A Cucumber/git Workflow

Following on the heels of last month’s Cucumber talk, this discussion will outline an effective workflow for constructing your Rails projects utilizing Cucumber and git. The Outside-In model of Rails development will serve as a template for rapidly producing the greatest code the world has ever seen. If you’re a consultant trying to find a better way to engage your clients in the development process, or if you’re just looking for a good way to wrap your head around this Cucumber business the kids have been chattering about, then this is right up your alley.

Learn about Cucumber and Rails!

Nicholas Cancelliere will demonstrate how to hit the ground running with Cucumber: a plain text, story-driven framework that sits on top of RSpec or Test::Unit providing a business-readable domain-specific language and test automation.

Nicholas is a Ruby on Rails developer and certified (CSM/CSP) Agile web application project manager living in Austin, TX. He has over a decade and a half of experience in web application development working in companies of all sizes: from large multi-national corporations (NTT Communications, Verio, Trion), to mid-sized dot-com start-ups (HomeAway), and a couple of small privately owned businesses.

Spring is here and it’s becoming painfully obvious that I should stop dressing for winter. However, I rock the sandals all year long. Word.

We’re gathering together this month to talk about another Javascript framework for “rich Internet applications” called ExtJS and we’ll also review options for background processing in Rails when you need to pull a long-running task out of the HTTP request/response cycle.

So, SXSW Interactive is over and it was good.

Particularly, I heard that the Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour sponsored by OtherInbox and FiveRuns was good. In years past, we’ve skipped the March meeting because we used to do mid-month meetings and it always coincided with the festival. Now that we’ve adjusted to Fourth Tuesday, we will be having our regular meeting this month. Wow, seeing you guys two times in one month! Remember, you can always come out to Cafe Bedouins to work on your projects on Tuesdays at Thunderbird if you would like as well.

Yes, we are having a meeting this month! I apologize for my tardiness in posting this note.

This month we’re going to go into the finer points of creating Rails forms with a screencast from Pragmatic called “Forms Essentials”. They’ve been gracious enough to give us permission to show the episode to our group. It’s a part of their Mastering Rails Forms series. We are also going to get an overview of CouchDB, a “distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API”, implemented in Erlang. Here’s a technical overview if you want to read up on it.

Welcome to 2009!

We’ve got an interesting mix to kick off the year. We’ll go deep into creating Rails forms with a screencast from Pragmatic called “Forms Essentials”. They’ve been gracious enough to give us permission to show the episode to our group. It’s a part of their Mastering Rails Forms series. We are also going to get a high-level overview of Django and how it compares with Rails.

Episode 1: Form Essentials (30 minutes)

December 9th, 7:00 p.m. Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

Sponsored by Appozite, creator of CheapTweet.com and ZiteFight.com.

For December, Austin on Rails is shifting from our normal presentation-based format to a purely social gathering. We love to join up with other great tech groups in Austin, and this time we’ll be co-hosting the event with our friends at Refresh Austin. There’s some decent overlap between our groups, and it’ll be a great chance to catch up with friends you may not have seen in a while as well as meet new friends as passionate about the Web and technology as we are.

Next week, we’re going to join up with the Refresh Austin group on Tuesday night (12/9 at 7pm), for pints of beer and billiards at Buffalo Billiards on 6th. It’s become a bit of a tradition in Austin on Rails to have a holiday party in December. It’s still geeking out, but just with more beer and bar games.

This is a low frills shindig conceived so we can meet some more good web peeps here in town and chill out as a group in a social setting.

Meeting Details

inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor). As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

The weather has turned cool. Finally! Or has it? It’s Fall in Austin…Psyche! I think it was like 90 degrees at Maker Faire today. By the way, here’s a picture of me with R2-D2. Just so you know that we are not only bringing together Ruby and Rails developers, but that we are now reaching out to robots as well. Exciting times.

Meeting Details

Come on out this month to Datran Media at 7th and Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor). As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!