Thanks to Tim Tyrrell for organizing the Rails meeting this month. Looking forward to this event.

Refactoring WTF into OMG — Strategies for success - Keith Gaddis

Rails is a powerful platform that gives us lots of tools for creating solid web apps. Unfortunately, with that power comes a high likelihood that you’ll shoot yourself in the foot at some point, or inherit the results of someone else’s education. If you’ve ever inherited someone’s early experiments in Rails development, built a project without a test suite, or just have a plain old legacy application to maintain (or some combination of all three!) this is the talk for you.

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.

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. :)