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.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

After a 2-year history of meeting at Frog Design (thanks!), we've got new digs for Austin On Rails! We will be meeting a few blocks over at Datran Media at 7th and Brazos. The meeting room is actually on the 8th floor of the business tower of the Omni Hotel building. The elevator requires a keycard, so we will have to shuttle folks up as they arrive. For this reason, I am going to suggest that people show up at 6:30PM and meet at the elevators just inside the building at the corner of 7th and Brazos. This will give us adequate time to get upstairs and get set up for the meeting. The meeting will run from 7-9PM as per usual. I'd like to thank Josh Baer of Datran Media for offering up a conference room for Austin on Rails.

Ruby and Rails Support in NetBeans IDE 6.0

The NetBeans IDE was originally created as a tool for Java developers. For quite a while now, however, it has had support for other programming languages. In version 6.0, the NetBeans IDE added support for yet another language: Ruby and its framework Ruby on Rails. The features include a powerful editor, refactorings, hints and quick fixes, a gem manager, an interactive shell, a full-featured debugger, and more. This presentation includes numerous demos that illustrate the productivity boost you can get by using NetBeans IDE 6.0 as your development environment for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications.

Gregg Sporar has been a software developer for over twenty years, working on projects ranging from control software for a burglar alarm to 3D graphical user interfaces. His interests include user interfaces, development tools, and performance profiling. He works for Sun Microsystems as a Technology Evangelist on the NetBeans project.

What's New in Ruby 1.9?

Released just this last Christmas, Ruby 1.9 is considered a "transitional" version towards 2.0 and includes several major and many minor changes to the language. This talk aims to get you up to speed on some new language features and the syntactic changes present in 1.9, with a quick overview of modifications to the standard library and notable performance improvements.

A Ruby developer since 2001, Bruce Williams has been pleased to see his favorite language rise out of obscurity the last few years -- and pay the bills in the process. A developer for FiveRuns, Bruce also does a bit of independent consulting, has contributed to or served as the technical editor for a number of Ruby and Rails books, speaks at conferences when inspiration strikes, and is an aimless open source hacker and language designer in his copious free time.

In lieu of our December meeting, we are going to celebrate our 2nd Anniversary as a group by having a holiday party. Yes, it's become an annual tradition by now...and a darn fine one at that.

We are going to meet at Buffalo Billiards on 6th Street (map) on Tuesday, December 11th from 6 to 9 PM. We currently don't have any official party sponsorship this year, so we are going to just meet up and grab some pool tables and hang out downtown at Buffalo. Should be fun!

Last year, we donated about 95 pounds of food to the CAFB (Capital Area Food Bank) and I think it would be great if we could do it again. So please, bring some non-perishable food items with you to Buffalo. I'll gather them all and then drop them off at the center. Thanks so much!

Looking forward to hanging out with you all (!) next week and shooting some pool while partaking in the beverage of your choice. :)

P.S. I'm looking for a few volunteers who are willing to meet me down there at 5:30 so we can grab up a couple of tables together. Please send me an email if you can help do this.