RubyJax

Brian Dainton of FiveRuns will be presenting at the next RubyJax. He will be talking about “Working with XMPP in Ruby.” He’ll also be talking a bit about working at FiveRuns, the tools they use, the problems they’ve overcome and scaling a big app.

Brian is a special guest star and is flying to Jax from Texas just to visit with us. He spoke at RailsConf and is one of the top Rails folks in the country. This is one meeting not to miss!

The meeting will take place on Thursday Aug 21 at the Navigator Coffee Squadron (which used to be called Sipper’s) at 7:00 PM.

7643 Gate Pkwy
Jacksonville, FL 32256
(904) 928-0048
map

• RubyJax is BYOB (even at Navigator).
• Coffee, Tea, Smoothies, pastries, bagels, muffins and stuff will be available for purchase. Please support Navigator, they are not charging us and are staying open just for us, so please buy something.

The next meeting will take place on Thursday Aug 21 at the Navigator Coffee Squadron (which used to be called Sipper’s) at 7:00 PM.

7643 Gate Pkwy
Jacksonville, FL 32256
(904) 928-0048
map

• The topic hasn’t been set yet.
• RubyJax is BYOB (even at Navigator).
• Coffee, Tea, Smoothies, pastries, bagels, muffins and stuff will be available for purchase. Please support Navigator, they are not charging us and are staying open just for us, so please buy something.

To contrast all the Textmate goodness that will be going on tomorrow night, Tim Pope will be talking about Vim. He will be sharing the vim_love with everyone because that’s what he’s got: VIM-LOVE for EVERYONE. That’s V-I-M—L-O-V-E. Which is comes from T-I-M-S-V-I-M-L-O-V-E.

(Tim asked me to write this post just like this) (No he didn’t) (“Tim Pope did not approve this message”)

Go here for the address and time and stuff.

The topic will be a group discussion/demonstration of Textmate tips and shortcuts. If time allows it will be followed by a group discussion/demonstration of plugins and testing tips. If time allows will will have a group discussion/demonstration about stories of unsatisfying encounters with prostitutes.

The next meeting will be July 17th at 7:00 PM back at Avality (7406 Fullerton St, Jax, FL, 32256), which is right across the street from the Avenues Mall.

We still don’t have a topic or a speaker so if you’d like to give a talk let me know. Tiger suggested doing lightning talks where a few people can present for ten to twenty minutes each. If you want to give a lighting talk, let me know. If we don’t get anyone to volunteer then I will try my best to entertain by either juggling bricks, stories of unsatisfying encounters with prostitutes or showing some Textmate tricks.

• what: Ruby Best Practice Patterns
• who: Rein Henrichs
• where: team gaia warehouse, 510 w 5th st., atlantic beach, fl 32233
• when: wednesday, june 18th 7-9pm
• why: This presentation is being prepared for Ruby Hoedown ‘08.

Design patterns are all about making the right decision. Making the right decision consistently leads to successful software. This presentation will help you learn how expert Ruby coders make the right decisions by demonstrating and explaining some of the most useful Ruby Best Practice Patterns. These patterns are inspired and informed by Kent Beck’s seminal Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns book and taken from Rein’s upcoming Ruby Best Practice Patterns book. The examples are gathered from some of your favorite Ruby gems and from Ruby itself, by way of Rubinius !

directions to team gaia

we’re back at the beach this time since rob warner will be out of town, so availity avails us no availability.

The next meeting is next week on Thursday. You can read about it here.

RefreshJax has moved their meetings to the first Thursday of the month. So their next meeting will be June 6th.

JaxPhp and JaxWeb have regular monthly meetings. Find out about them here and here.

I just found out about a Rails job here in town: Sr. Java developer with J2ee and Ruby on Rails. Healthcare experience is a plus. Three month contract to hire. If you’re interested, give me a shout and I’ll get you the deets. (I know, I know: I am actually typing “deets” instead of “details.” I am a loser.)

• Topic: jQuery, integrating with rails, jQuery and prototype, the Less Js Routes Plugin
• Who: Steven Bristol of Less Everything
• When: Thur. May 22nd. at 7:00PM
• Where: Same place as the last meeting. 7406 Fullerton St, Jax, FL, 32256, which is right across the street from the Avenues Mall.

Sorry for the short notice, but I just found out myself.

This Wed. April 9th I will be giving at talk about Rails to the Java Users Group here in town. The meeting will take place at 7:00 PM at Availity, the same place where our RubyJax meeting will be.

Here is a copy of the email that Bridget sent out:

Steve Bristol of less everything and RubyJax has graciously agreed to give us a presentation on Rails. Meeting is at 7pm, Wed, 4/9, at Availity, 7406 Fullerton St . He’ll probably also have info about BarCamp Jacksonville which is on Saturday, May 10th. Bridget

This should be a fun time. If you want to see a presentation on Rails, or just want to see me talk to a bunch of Java folks, come on out. (Feel free to heckle.)

• When: Thursday 4/17 at 7:00 PM.
• Speakers: Chad Bearden and Burt Hood of Bear Den Designs
• Topic: HAML and SASS.
• Where: Same place as the last meeting. 7406 Fullerton St, Jax, FL, 32256, which is right across the street from the Avenues Mall.

This month’s speaker Big Tiger has ask me to take a few minutes and talk about our new open source social network Lovd By Less. See ya on Thursday.

• Time: this Thur. Mar. 20 at 7:00 PM.
• Speaker and Topic: Big Tiger will talk about Amazon’s EC2 and S3.
• Location: 7406 Fullerton St, Jax, FL, 32256 which is right across the street from the Avenues Mall.

Map

See ya there!

The next meeting of RubyJax will be held on Wed. 2/13 at the Mandarin Branch of the Public Library, at 6:30 – 8:45.

The address is Mandarin Branch, 3330 Kori Rd. and their phone number is: (904) 262-5201.

Very sorry for the short notice, but hopefully the pair programming will make up for it!

There will be a very special guest who will be pairing on the advanced side. One of the guys from Less Everything will be in town!

Feel free to call me if you have any trouble finding the place: 510-701-1706

The next meeting of RubyJax will be here soon, and in the spirit of the holiday season (Valentine’s), we would like to show some love. At the next meeting we will be doing pair programming. The idea is that we have some really experienced ruby/rails developers in the group and some really new ruby/rails developers. In an effort to lift the community we would like to pair a newer person (to ruby) with a more experienced person. The newer person can choose any topic they want and we will match them up with someone who knows that topic and they can spend an hour and a half together hacking and talking.

Here are a few ideas:

• Intro to Ruby
• Ruby Meta-programming
• Into to Rails
• Rails testing intro
• Rails testing with rspec
• Rails testing non-rspec
• Unit testing Ruby (w/o rails)
• Comparing Ruby to your language of choice
• Merb
• RJS
• Rails 2.0
• Hack on a your project (micro-volunteering anyone?)
• Anything you want

To help us coordinate a bit, please send me an email (steve {at} lesseverything [dot] com) and tell me:

• Which side of the pair you’d like to be on.
• What you would like to hack on.
• Do you have a preferred partner (only one luckey soul will get to pair with l4rk).
• If you will be bringing your laptop and what OS it is running.

Here is a list of experienced ruby/rails people to choose from (if you name is not listed here, please let me know and I will add it):

• Desi
• Lark
• Obie
• Steve

The next meeting of RubyJax will be held this Thursday evening at 7:00 PM (directions).

Obie Fernandez will be giving a talk about Advanced Active Record. Active Record is an ORM library used by Ruby on Rails and other ruby frameworks.

Obie’s talk may or may not cover the following Advanced Active Record topics:

• What is Active Record
• How to use find, and make your own custom finders.
• The secret difference between belongs_to and has_one.
• What exactly is has_many :through.
• How to make a double polymorphic association with STI on both sides.
• How make a triple polymorphic table.
• The polymorphic doppleganger pattern.
• Why Martin Folwer is considered the grand-father of Rails.
• The internals of Active Record.
• How to write your own adapter to your own files system database.
• The best way to refactor Active Record associations.
• What to say to Josh Susser to get him to give your patch a +1.
• How make session data available to your models.
• The proper use of with_scope.
• How to use alias_method_chain.
• And many more.

The Schedule for the meeting is as follows:

• 7:00 People start to arrive, mingle, get a drink
• 7:15 “Official” Start To Meeting
  • Next meeting announcement
  • News
• 7:20 Warm up topic: Liger and Steve will try to get people to talk and interact.
• 7:30 Intro For Obie
• 7:31 Headline Topic: Obie Fernandez “Advanced Active Record”
• 8:30 Close out meeting
  • Werewolf or something
• 8:50 Clean up
• 9:00 Leave.