We are incredibly humbled and excited by the selection of Austin, Texas for RailsConf 2012.

Austin on Rails was founded at the end of 2005 by Damon Clinkscales, Rob Rasmussen, and Rob Jones, just as Rails 1.0 was about to release. We’ve been meeting monthly ever since and our membership has grown to 200+ and regularly host meetings of 50-75 developers. We’ve built a strong community here and we are ready to do everything that is needed to make RailsConf 2012 a resounding success.

Exciting times in the Austin on Rails community! We’ve just come off of an another amazing year of the Lone Star Ruby Conference organized by Jim Freeze and a cadre of dedicated staff/volunteers. What a blessing it is for us here in Austin to have that conference continue to thrive.

This month, we are going to have talks from developers at Gowalla and Mass Relevance about common mistakes developers tend to make in Rails and how to run a high traffic Rails site with Varnish.

Awesome News! Barry Cox and Carlos Cabrera (the designer of the AoR logo) have put together a web site to buy the new Austin on Rails shirt!

We are rushing through the first order (must order before Monday, 5/2) so that those going to Railsconf can show their Austin pride.

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)

Merry Christmas! Oops wait…wrong month. It’s 2010 folks…and it’s shaping up to be a good one for the Austin Rails community. Our community is stronger now than ever and we’ll continue with our work (ha! we are coding in Ruby after all) this year.

What should we do for the August meeting? Our fearless leader (wait, that’s me) is going to be out of the country (well not really, but you get the idea). I can’t be at the meeting.

What should we do for the meeting? Who can help out? More mini-talks? Does anyone have an interesting topic up their sleeve?

You’ll have the undying gratitude of your Rails peers if you do something.

Thanks!

Learn about Cucumber and Rails!

Nicholas Cancelliere will demonstrate how to hit the ground running with Cucumber: a plain text, story-driven framework that sits on top of RSpec or Test::Unit providing a business-readable domain-specific language and test automation.

Nicholas is a Ruby on Rails developer and certified (CSM/CSP) Agile web application project manager living in Austin, TX. He has over a decade and a half of experience in web application development working in companies of all sizes: from large multi-national corporations (NTT Communications, Verio, Trion), to mid-sized dot-com start-ups (HomeAway), and a couple of small privately owned businesses.

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.

So, SXSW Interactive is over and it was good.

Particularly, I heard that the Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour sponsored by OtherInbox and FiveRuns was good. In years past, we’ve skipped the March meeting because we used to do mid-month meetings and it always coincided with the festival. Now that we’ve adjusted to Fourth Tuesday, we will be having our regular meeting this month. Wow, seeing you guys two times in one month! Remember, you can always come out to Cafe Bedouins to work on your projects on Tuesdays at Thunderbird if you would like as well.