This month’s meeting is organized by Keith Gaddis of Collective Idea. Thanks for the help Keith! This may be the most epic meeting we’ve had in a long time.

Database Anti-Patterns - Xavier Shay

Things people often do in rails that they probably shouldn’t.

Xavier has been using Rails for many years, and worked with all sorts of databases: from universities, to high traffic websites, to financial exchanges. He is currently running training sessions throughout the US on how to use your database to write rock solid Rails applications.

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Mattt Thompson - I18n and L10n on Rails 3

In this talk, you’ll learn everything you need to know to get your site ready for a global audience. After a gentle introduction to the fundamentals of software internationalization and localization, we’ll take a deep dive into the Rails 3 I18n API and other useful tools and plug-ins.

Mattt Thompson (@mattt) is a hacker and iPad developer at Gowalla.

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Railsconf 2010 Recap

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Rails 3 Overview / Merb to Rails 3

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Richard Schneeman - Rails 3.0 Email

No matter what new communication protocols we adopt in the future, email is here to stay. So if you’re not taking advantage of ActionMailer in Ruby on Rails you’re missing out. In this talk, we’ll cover ActionMailer basics as well as the changes coming to email in rails 3.0. We’ll go into depth on sending & receiving emails, as well as the testing techniques used to make sure that WhySpam.me stays up and running. For those of you that haven’t delved into guts email before we’ll be introducing how email structure including MIME types and discussing some different ways to set up your own production mail server.

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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.

Update: Michael Bernstein will not be speaking this evening. Continue reading »

Howdy everyone!

Due to the Christmas holiday, we will be having a social event in lieu of a standard meeting. Normal meeting schedule resumes in January!

Party!

It’s time for the Second Annual Austin on Rails / Refresh Austin party and this time the fine folks of WordPress Austin will join us as co-hosts. Even better, the first 100 people to join us at the party will get a free drink thanks to our neighbor Rackspace (they’re right down the road in San Antonio).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Yes, we are having a meeting this month! I apologize for my tardiness in posting this note.

This month we’re going to go into the finer points of creating Rails forms with a screencast from Pragmatic called “Forms Essentials”. They’ve been gracious enough to give us permission to show the episode to our group. It’s a part of their Mastering Rails Forms series. We are also going to get an overview of CouchDB, a “distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API”, implemented in Erlang. Here’s a technical overview if you want to read up on it.

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Welcome to 2009!

We’ve got an interesting mix to kick off the year. We’ll go deep into creating Rails forms with a screencast from Pragmatic called “Forms Essentials”. They’ve been gracious enough to give us permission to show the episode to our group. It’s a part of their Mastering Rails Forms series. We are also going to get a high-level overview of Django and how it compares with Rails.

Episode 1: Form Essentials (30 minutes)

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December 9th, 7:00 p.m. Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

Sponsored by Appozite, creator of CheapTweet.com and ZiteFight.com.

For December, Austin on Rails is shifting from our normal presentation-based format to a purely social gathering. We love to join up with other great tech groups in Austin, and this time we’ll be co-hosting the event with our friends at Refresh Austin. There’s some decent overlap between our groups, and it’ll be a great chance to catch up with friends you may not have seen in a while as well as meet new friends as passionate about the Web and technology as we are.

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Meeting Details

inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor). As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

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The weather has turned cool. Finally! Or has it? It’s Fall in Austin…Psyche! I think it was like 90 degrees at Maker Faire today. By the way, here’s a picture of me with R2-D2. Just so you know that we are not only bringing together Ruby and Rails developers, but that we are now reaching out to robots as well. Exciting times.

Meeting Details

Come on out this month to Datran Media at 7th and Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor). As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

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Come on out this month to Datran Media at 7th and Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor). As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

Ike may not have brought us rain but it has fortunately ushered in a trifecta of Ruby talk goodness this month. We'll hear what OtherInbox has been up to, learn how to build a Facebook app with Rails, and get a Ruby primer on the hottest new protocol on the web: XMPP.

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Come on out this month to Datran Media at 7th and Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor) to catch a tutorial on state machines and pick up some new Ruby ORM skills. As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

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Greetings Austin Railers

Another hot Austin summer is in full swing and we've got another smokin' meeting for you to boot! Except this time, you are the star. Yes folks, it's true...it's time for another round of lightning talks where you tell us what's up. In addition, we've got some boys from College Station (that hotbed of crackling technological firepower) coming down to give us a preview of their Lone Star talk on Merb, the most popular of the Rails alternative Ruby web frameworks.

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Eric Falcao’s Client-Side Performance in Rails

and

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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!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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The Working With Rails site has been updated with a bunch of new features. One of them is a Groups feature, so I decided to create the Austin On Rails group today. Feel free to join if you are a regular attendee of Austin On Rails.

Greetings Austin Railers!

For June, we will have a RailsConf recap from those of you who attended the 2nd Annual Rails Conference in Portland. Fun times!

We will also have a presentation from Mike Perham on ActiveScaffold, a Rails plugin for generating AJAXy CRUD.

never fun and quite often tedious. One key attribute for a good user interface is consistency but it still takes a knowledgeable and diligent development team to create the web pages which follow through on that design. ActiveScaffold is a plugin for Ruby on Rails (aka Rails) which provides dynamic model-based view generation. Instead of having to create pages by hand which display your models, ActiveScaffold will introspect your ActiveRecord models and dynamically generate a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface for managing those objects.

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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 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.