Hey Everyone

The recent Ruby in Austin survey was very informative. Thanks so much for your participation! We didn’t quite get to a resolution on every issue, but we did learn a few things.

1 Almost every respondent was interested in having a non-Rails Ruby meeting in the evening. (92%)

2 There is a large overlap of potential attendees (79% would like to attend both)

Back in the saddle after the holidays and what has blown into town? Cedar pollen! Good luck out there folks…Looking forward to seeing you all again this month. We’re going to talk video games and telephony in Ruby. Should be a hoot.

Writing Video Games in Ruby with Gosu - Mason and Garrett Hale

Writing video games in Ruby is a heck of a lot of fun and surprisingly easy. In this session you’ll learn everything you need to know to start writing your own video games using the awesome Gosu library. We’ll build a simple 2D game and cover all the basics of event loops, animation, collision detection, game controller support and audio and video effects along the way. Be sure to bring your laptop to play (or build) along. By the way, this is a great session for kids who are interested in getting into programming.

Due to the the Thanksgiving holiday our meeting has been moved up this month to November 17th. We’ve got an awesome meeting this month and we hope you can make it out!

Many people who love git have a tendency to get excited by the internals of it; how it does the things that make it so great. For the uninitiated, these details can be intimidating and more than a little opaque. We’ll look at a (very) brief over-view of what git is and isn’t, then get to the more important question to the working developer: “How do I use it?” We’ll look at commonly used commands, discuss various work-flows, and compare and contrast subversion’s ways of doing things. The focus will be on how to get things done, not how does git work.

This month is all about you. We’re interested to know what you have been building, what have you learned lately, etc. Is there a neat little class you made or a trick you found?

Please step up and share something with the group!

We’ll also be hearing from Ross Andrews about his recent play with the Dhaka Parser Generator for Ruby. Using Dhaka, we will go through building a lexer, parser, and evaluator for a small query language. Then we’ll tempt the demo gods and show a Rails application with a search system that utilizes our new language. No previous knowledge of lex/yacc is required, although a basic understanding of BNF and how a parser works is recommended. Ross Andrews is a Rails developer in Austin. He works for the SuperPoints Network, making Rails and Facebook applications

Spring is here and it’s becoming painfully obvious that I should stop dressing for winter. However, I rock the sandals all year long. Word.

We’re gathering together this month to talk about another Javascript framework for “rich Internet applications” called ExtJS and we’ll also review options for background processing in Rails when you need to pull a long-running task out of the HTTP request/response cycle.