Austin On Rails

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.

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.

The Deal

This month, we're going to combine two tastes that taste great together...Rails (the chocolate) and Entrepreneurship (the peanut butter).

A lot of us probably have business ideas and we wonder if we should pursue them. But is a good idea enough? How will your business make money? Do you need funding? If you can't do everything on your list, how do you find good people to help you achieve your goals? This meeting is intended to get the conversation about Austin-based Rails projects going, bring people together, and spur people to action.

Meeting Details

Frog Design at 8th/Congress

7PM - 9PM

Our Speaker

Matt Cohen is a Reese's Cup: a business technologist. He is an entrepreneur, consultant, and a Venture Fellow at G-51 Capital, a seed and early stage venture capital firm founded in Austin in 1997. At G-51, he evaluates investment opportunities and provides technology management support for G-51's portfolio companies. He has consulted with companies nationwide on technology and business strategy, was Senior VP of Operations and CTO for New Century Network (NCN) in New York (a content and advertising network of over 150 online newspapers), and co-founded HoustonChronicle.com in 1994. He has a CS degree from Rice University, loves Ruby and Rails, and knows the reason for /dev/zero.

Hour One

Matt will talk about the business side of your Rails project: its business potential, revenue options, and possible funding sources.

Hour Two

We are going to open up the floor to anyone who is interested to pitch a Rails-based business idea you've been thinking about, getting feedback or soliciting help from Austin-based designers, coders, and entrepreneurs. Matt will offer his perspective on the pitches as well.