Austin On Rails

UPDATE: Location: DATRAN MEDIA in the Omni Hotel Bldg. (7th & Brazos) - 8th floor - either meet by elevators or if they are unlocked, head on up!

Folks, we've got a stunningly good meeting lineup this month. In fact, it's safe for you all to come back after you skipped my talk last time. ;-) I am sad to say that I actually won't be able to attend this month's meeting, as I'll be in the Bay Area at Velocity Conference. I am leaving the emcee duties in Josh Baer's capable hands. If you are wanting to keep up to date with Rails or performance tweak some existing apps, you *must* come out to the meeting this time.

Client-Side Performance Measurement & Optimization by Eric Falcao

Performance optimization tends to focus on topics like database tuning or server-side caching with the goal of getting response times as low as possible. A recent trend in client side optimization has been found to provide huge performance improvements to the user's experience.

In this talk, we will explore how to best measure the client-side download time and look at how to implement best practices (from O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites) using a mongrel/rails/nginx stack.

Eric Falcao is a software developer at FiveRuns who has a passion for Internet startups and the business of software. Formerly of the .NET world, Eric is glad to be a part of the Ruby and Rails community and an advocate for the great startup climate in Austin. He blogs at http://austinentrepreneur.wordpress.com.

What's Coming in Rails 2.1? by Steven Smith

Rails 2.1 was announced at this year's Rails Conference and had 1,400 contributors which resulted in 1,600+ patches. A lot has been done since the release of 2.0, which occurred approximately six months ago. This session will cover the major new features of Rails 2.1 including UTC-based migrations, better timezone support, and better caching.

Steven Smith is the Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at OtherInbox. He also founded FiveRuns, a venture-backed start up with the goal of bringing a simpler, smarter solution to the Ruby on Rails monitoring and management marketplace. Prior to FiveRuns, Steven was the CTO of Tonic Software and SVP of R&D at Neon Systems. He was also Founder and CEO of Relational Development, Inc., a software company specializing in System Management solutions from 1991 to 1998.

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. ;-)

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.

We are having an introductory Ruby and Rails workshop the night before the Lone Star Ruby Conference. Admission to the workshop is for you to make a donation to one or more of the charities we are supporting:

• Habitat for Humanity
• Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Muscular Dystrophy Association
• Capital Area Food Bank
• Ruby Central

We've already raised over $800 in the first week, which is wonderful, but we are far from our goal of $2500. We would greatly appreciate your support with these endeavors. The speaker list for the evening workshop (9/6, 6-10PM) is as follows:

• hal fulton - ruby overview
• james edward gray ii - blocks
• bret pettichord - testing in ruby
• marcel molina, jr - why i <3 ruby
• bruce tate - rails overview
• bruce williams - taming your views
• rick olson - active record for the masses
• robert rasmussen - 30 minutes rails live demo

We can't wait to get everyone together for this event.

Please join us! Thank you.

NOTE: Lone Star Ruby Conference pricing goes up after August 10th to $300. You can save $100 by registering this week!

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.