Austin On Rails

Greetings Austin Railers,

We're going to do a 1-2 combo punch this month with some more introductory Rails material as a warmup to some very interesting details from the S3 implementation at 37Signals.

Edward Cruz has signed on to continue his talk from last month leading us deeper into the Rails rabbit hole.

Marcel Molina, Jr. will lead us through his OSCON 2007 talk about his experiences implementing S3 at 37Signals. In the fall of 2006, 37signals moved all the uploads they had on their Basecamp and Campfire applications to S3. Migrating around five million files revealed a set of unexpected challenges. In the end, going with S3 was a big win, but it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed at the outset. This talk will go over what questions you'll have to answer and issues you'll have to deal with when moving your infrastructure over to S3 that you might not have expected.

David Bluestein will be emceeing the meeting this month.

So please come on out and join us on August 7th from 7-9PM at Frog Design (8th and Congress). Beverages and what not to follow at Hickory Street.

Greetings Austin Railers!

This month, we're going to do a block of member mini-presentations again. I've received some feedback that the group is sometimes difficult to navigate for newbies because our typical talks often assume an existing understanding of many aspects of Rails. Naturally, it is difficult to please everyone. We need to strike some kind of balance. On the one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume a basic understanding of Rails for our talks, and on the other I want to help encourage those who are just coming to Rails to get off on the right foot. I'd like our group to be a resource to both newbies and ninjas alike. It seems like a noble goal anyway. :)

So for part one of the evening, we are going to call it "If I Met A NEWB On The Street, What Would We Talk About?"

Lightning Talks:

• Creating a Rails Project in SVN and Setting Up Capistrano (Steve Odom)
• Controllers and Views: What's the Deal? (Edward Cruz)
• The Basics of Active Record (Mars Hall)
• Getting Started with Rails Migrations (Damon Clinkscales)
• Intro to irb and console (Damon Clinkscales)
• Rails Security Tip: CSRF & CSRFkiller (Tom Brown)

I am grateful to those of you who have stepped up and offered to present.

For the second slot of the evening, we are very fortunate to have Bret Pettichord, a testing expert who has recently returned to Austin, speak to us about Watir. Watir is written in Ruby and is one of the more popular Ruby libraries. It was actually written before Rails and was designed to be a general-purpose testing tool, suitable for web applications regardless of implementation technology.

Bret will be presenting a Watir demo that is based on the Depot Rails application developed in the Agile Rails book and describing how you can use Watir with Rails apps.

Bret Pettichord has been programming in Ruby since 2003. He is the lead developer of the Watir testing tool and the test architect at Dovetail. Since 2000, he has hosted the Austin Workshop on Test Automation . He is also co-author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing, a Jolt-award finalist.

We look forward to seeing you there. The meeting is at Frog Design and 8th and Congress. Beverages and What Not to follow at Hickory Street.