Austin On Rails

Howdy Austin Railers!

This coming Tuesday will be our first time on our new schedule (4th Tuesdays), which was selected by our membership as the best night for us to gather.

We are are going to bring together two tastes that taste great together, Bootstrapping and Rails. We'll have two of the leaders in Bootstrap Austin (Bijoy and Edward) giving talks on bootstrapping and we'll be discussing how working with Rails can help you get that side project or software startup idea out of your brain and into the browser. We are also fortunate to have two bootstrappers, Damon Flowers and Dave Wolpert, sharing a brief overview of what they are bootstrapping, how it is going so far, and what tools they are using to build up their sites.

Bijoy Goswami develops universal models that help individuals and organizations unlock their fullest potential. He packages these models in stories, books, communities, training and web sites. A consummate evangelist for his various projects, he has been featured in local and national media.

Edward Cruz's day job is working as a grizzled IT veteran specializing in e-commerce implementations. His passion is in finding ways to extend current web technologies into everyday human endeavors in ways that are collaborative, cooperative, and progressive. His latest project, Molecular Thinking (http://www.molecularthinking.com), is an accidental web 2.0 site that enables collaborative online brainstorming and ideation.

Here's the rough agenda for Tuesday (with a little twist on our usual format):

7:00-7:10 Welcome and Announcements
7:10-7:35 Bootstrapping 101 - Bijoy Goswami, Aviri/Bootstrap Austin
7:35-7:45 Damon Flowers, Dwellgo - Overview/Feedback
7:45-7:55 Dave Wolpert, PubMaven - Overview/Feedback
7:55-8:05 BREAK / GIVEAWAY

8:05-8:30 Bootstrapping With Rails - Edward Cruz, Molecular Thinking/Bootstrap Austin
8:30-8:55 Meet and Greet (People Mashup - connect with bootstrappers in Austin)

I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about bootstrapping and how we as a group can help each other and others harness the power of Rails to create!

The meeting will be held at Datran Media at the corner of 7th and Brazos. Please try to show up around 6:30 so that we'll have time to get everyone shuttled upstairs. We'll meet at the bank of elevators just inside the door. Socialization practice to follow afterwards at a local pub.

Looking forward to seeing everybody!

Note: If you are interested in bootstrapping and you haven't yet watched DHH at Startup School 2008, you totally should. Turn comments off, though. You'll see what I mean. ;-)

Next Monday night (3/10/2008), we are having an AOR SXSW Happy Hour (sponsored by FiveRuns). The event is from 6-9PM in the Recreation Room at Buffalo Billiards (upstairs). There will be games galore (including Wii), beer, appetizers, and Rails geeks from all over the world. The first 100 attendees shall receive a very choice "Rails at SXSW" T-shirt. So, do come early!

You do not have to be a SXSW Interactive attendee (but if you are, just bring your badge) to enter the party. However, if you don't have a badge, please send an email to "sxsw [at] fiveruns.com" to reserve your party spot. If you're feeling particularly social and geeky, you can add your name to upcoming.org (currently over 70 Attending so far!)

Secondly, the meeting night poll concluded on March 1 and the results were strongly in favor of holding our meetings on the 4th Tuesday of the month (full poll results in the sidebar). We aren't having a regular meeting in March due to the happy hour, but we will begin our fancy new schedule in April, on April 22nd. So, please mark your calendars. I have updated the Google Calendar accordingly.

Looking forward to seeing you next Monday!

Howdy Folks

We had an awesome meeting last month and a great turnout (50-ish). We even had a shar-pei attend the meeting. Yes, we are that welcoming. The January meeting not only marked our first meeting at the new space at Datran Media, it also served as the backdrop for a photo shoot and article by Lori Hawkins of the Austin American Statesman. It was nice to have our little group featured so prominently.

Here are a couple of followups that you might like:

• Bruce Williams' Ruby 1.9 slides
• Bruce Williams' Ruby 1.8 / 1.9 comparison app
• Gregg Sporar's Ruby Tooling in NetBeans slides
• Gregg's writeup of his visit to Austin on Rails (and Atlanta)

Sun gave us some great prizes for the meeting (a few USB key drives and T-shirts), which was totally unexpected. Thanks Gregg and Sun!

Looking forward to the February meeting, everyone!

We'll be meeting again at Datran Media at 7th & Brazos in the Omni Hotel building. We'll gather by the elevators and shuttle up to the meeting room as we did in January. Please try to arrive by 6:30 so we can get everyone upstairs and start the meeting on time. The meeting will run from 7-9PM with socialization practice afterwards. This month, we'll be exploring a couple of supporting technologies to Rails, the PostgreSQL relational database and git, a distributed revision control system.

Guyren Howe will be presenting a talk called PostgreSQL Instead, in which he will discuss why he considers Postgres to be a much better database than MySQL. MySQL is a prominently used Rails database so it will be interesting to hear about the benefits of Postgres.

Guyren Howe is an Australian who consults here in Austin on databases, web applications and desktop applications (using PHP, Rails, and REALbasic mostly) for Relevant Logic, LLC. He is one of the developers of Actionitem.com.

Rein Henrichs will be presenting a talk on the git revision control system. git, a new and wildly popular version control system written by Linus Torvalds, is the best thing since a series of tubes. Its design philosophy promotes good developer habits and its simple interface helps teams large and small spend less time managing their code and more time writing it. Learn what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to simplify your development workflow for a happier and more productive team.

Rein Henrichs is a Software Engineer at Facilities Technology Group. He has been designing for the web for 5 years and working with Ruby and Rails for over two years. He contributes to various open source projects, including Merb, DataMapper, and Eskort. He is passionate about web standards, creating joyful user interfaces, and the programmable web.

Finally, I'd like to announce that for our March meeting, we are co-hosting the Austin On Rails SXSW Happy Hour with FiveRuns. FiveRuns has been kind enough to foot the bill for the extravaganza and all signs point to w00t!

The Rails party will be held in the evening of March 10, 2008 in the new Buffalo Billiards Recreation Room, which includes multiple video game consoles, among other games. You do not have to be a SXSW attendee to come to the party, but you will need to RSVP to FiveRuns to get your name on the list.

Good Austin American Statesman article on Ruby on Rails and the Austin community around it.