Austin On Rails

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!

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.

Please come out and mingle with all the Ruby and Rails enthusiasts visiting town for the SXSW Interactive Festival. We are taking over The Lodge at Buffalo Billiards at 6th and Brazos. This years party is going to be bigger than last year and all the food and drink is on the house, courtesy of FiveRuns. Please let us know if you are coming by registering at upcoming.org so we'll have an idea of the headcount.

SPECIAL NOTE: If you do not have a badge, you must also email me at [scales] [at] [pobox.com] to RSVP for entrance to the party.

I posted some pix of the SXSW Happy Hour on Flickr. If you have any photos you want to post to the group, drop me a line at rob at nonewmessages dot com.

After months of planning, last night we held the Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour and I think we can safely say it was a resounding success! I did not personally count how many people showed up, but I can safely say a few hundred happy SXSW'ers showed up. Kudos to Michal Buffington, Damon Clinkscales and me (Rob Jones) for helping pull this off. I will post some pictures up on the Austin on Rails Flickr Account when I get a minute.