Meeting: Tuesday, July 17th @ 7pm

Posted Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:27:00 GMT

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.