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2009 Schedule, the 2d half

2009-06-04T03:26:00Z

It’s June Already?

I can’t believe this year is already half over. We’ve been fortunate enough to have speakers since last October; the rest of the year is pretty exciting too. And so without further ado, here’s the current line-up from July to December 2009:

Schedule

Date	Topic	Speaker
14 Jul	Creating Mashups w/Ruby	Jess Martin
11 Aug	QA Testing w/Cucumber	Patrick Reagan
8 Sep	Midori, Rails-inspired PHP framework	Youssef Chaker
October	TBA	Andy Hunt
10 Nov	JRuby and Clojure	Keith Bennett
8 Dec	Rack	Matt Overstreet

Notes

If any of the meetings/speakers change I will send out a notice. Plus, the October meeting will be a joint meeting with the RJUG. As the dates get closer I’ll send out additional details on each speaker and their topic.

See you at the Meetings! Remember, spread the word and bring a friend!

June Meeting: Rich Kilmer & HotCocoa

2009-06-04T02:45:00Z

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 9 June
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

HotCocoa is a thin Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks. It simplifies the verbose OS X API so that you can programmatically construct user interfaces without Interface Builder.

MacRuby and HotCocoa

MacRuby is an implementation of the Ruby language that runs on the Objective-C runtime under OS X. MacRuby is based on Ruby 1.9 but contains substantial modifications including the merging of object models (every Object is an NSObject), using the Objective-C 2.0 generational garbage collector, moving core types (String, Fixnum, Array, Hash) atop their Objective-C counterparts and replacement of standard libraries to more optimally integrate with OS X. MacRuby also includes a new library, HotCocoa. HotCocoa is a thin, idiomatic Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks.

Cocoa classes have extremely verbose method and constant names. A substantial amount of code is written to just instantiate and configure instances of these classes. Interface Builder is used by most developers because it hides the complexity of manually configuring controls, but at the expense have having to use a GUI builder and the obscuring those configuration options inside the IB user interface. One of HotCocoa’s chief goals is to allow Interface Builder simplicity, but in Ruby code. Buttons, Sliders, Windows, WebViews—the whole works—HotCocoa simplifies this process by creating a mapping layer over the top of Objective-C classes. HotCocoa adds Ruby-friendly methods, constants and delegation techniques that look refreshingly simple, but do not prevent full use of the Cocoa APIs.

This talk with introduce MacRuby and HotCocoa and show demonstrations on how to use them to quickly build OS X desktop applications with Ruby.

Presenter Bio

Richard Kilmer is the founder of Virginia-based software and services company InfoEther, Inc and is a board member of Ruby Central. Rich’s background includes peer-to-peer software, wireless web, workflow, and pen computing. Rich has been using Ruby in production systems since 2002 and has contributed to many Ruby projects over the years including RubyGems and starting RubyForge. Rich’s current Ruby efforts are focused on simplifying OS X development with HotCocoa and is a contributor to the MacRuby project.

Side Note

This will also be the first co-meeting with the local CocoaHeads group. Should be an exciting time.

May Meeting Follow-up

2009-05-16T01:24:00Z

Summary

Lasting only 30 minutes I believe it was the shortest meeting ever. Next year I promise to schedule either a speaker or panel of speakers to recap RailsConf.

Attendance

I happy to say we had three new members for May’s meeting. I’m not happy to say it was 60% of the total attendance. :-D

Additional Information

Next Meeting

HotCocoa and MacRuby!!! Tell everybody! I’m totally psyched that we have Rich Kilmer, from InfoEther, coming into town to school us on some HotCocoa. This is also going to be a joint meeting with Richmond’s CocoaHeads Group. I’m expecting a packed house for the June meeting.

Announcements

JetBrains Winners

Michael Berdichevsky : RubyMine License
Will O’Donovan : RubyMine License

Area Conferences

Developer Day in DC on 30 May
Ruby Nation 2009 on 12 and 13 June

May Meeting: Annual RailsConf ReCap

2009-05-05T22:02:00Z

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 12 May
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

The annual RailsConf ReCap wherein we learn about the latest and greatest.

Social in the Making

There is a strong chance this meeting will turn into a Social. I take full responsibility for not properly planning this meeting. I did not schedule a speaker, opting instead, to rely on members attending the conference to come and present their findings. So if you know someone attending RailsConf encourage them to join us and to give us their impressions of the conference.

However, it just might be time for a social anyways. Thankfully we’ve had 7 consecutive months of speakers. And the rest of the year is shaping up nicely too; I’ll be posting the schedule in the next few days.

Presenter Bio

<Your Name Here> or Your friend’s name ;-)

JetBrains is a new Sponsor

2009-04-22T03:32:00Z

I’m happy to announce, starting with our May meeting, the CVREG will be giving away 2 licenses to some JetBrains products.

Each month, our speaker and one member can choose their prize:

RubyMine Personal License,
ReSharper Personal License,
dotTrace Personal License,
IntelliJ IDEA Personal License,
TeamCity Build Agent (for our Continuous Integration and Build Server)

Overall, JetBrains is working with more than 350 groups globally, and have already given away more than 2000 licenses of ReSharper and IntelliJ IDEA!

I’ll be getting the ‘fine print’ (i.e. how soon a person will receive their license? is there a limit as to how many licenses a person can win? stuff like that…)

So at the start of each meeting if you want to be considered for a license give me your name, email address and desired license. At the end of the meeting I will announce the winner.

Remember, Spread the word and bring a Friend!

P.S. Notice the new logo in the Sponsor’s section? :-D

April Meeting Follow-up

2009-04-22T03:13:00Z

Summary

I believe this meeting will go down as one of the strangest meetings in CVREG history. Ben arrived early and as people started coming in it was noted the projector was missing. Oh No! While the projector was getting retrieved I did my best to entertain, but I failed miserably. Thankfully Ben and a few of the Viget Labs crew was on hand to talk about Developer Day and RubyNation.

I must say someone did ask what happened to my hair (my ponytail, actually) and if I was going to grow it out again. Ummm…no comment and maybe ;-)

But the real excitement was Ben’s presentation. Ben devised a way to drastically reduce time to display using a combination of page caching, AJAX and Rails Metal. I believe someone Ben trademark it. :-)

If you were in attendance please consider rating Ben’s presentation on SpeakerRate. I’ve included the link in the Additional Information section.

Attendance

We had 15 people at this month’s meeting. The third double-digit attendance. You guys Rock! We even had three brand new faces in attendance. Very encouraging. Please, keep spreading the word.

I would also encourage you to make suggestions on how we can serve your Ruby needs. Remember we have the mailing list and the IRC channel in which to post your questions and suggestions.

Additional Information

SpeakerRate

Next Meeting

Stay Tuned for details on May’s Meeting. I don’t have a speaker booked for May because of RailsConf. So, if you or someone you know is attending RailsConf stop by and give us your impressions. If nothing else we can all go to the pub for a pint or two. ;-)

Announcements

beCamp 2009 is happening again. If you’re not familiar if a BarCamp-style two-day conference held in Charlottesville, VA. This year is being held on 8 and 9 May. It looked like several people from the group will be attending. I encourage you to carpool. There will be a one-night hotel stay.

Developer Day is a one-day, developer-centric conference in DC. And did I mention it’s only Fifty Bucks (USD$50) [there is an additional $1.25 Fee when registering]? It’s being held on 30 May, that’s a Saturday if you don’t have a calendar handy. The website has additional information, like speakers, agenda, and a map!

Also, RubyNation 2009 is once again being held in Washington DC on 12-13 June. Registration is still open and be sure to use the discount code NovaRUGFan to get $20.00 off.

Last but definitely not least I want to say something about tonight’s sponsor: Viget Labs. They were kind enough to pay for this month’s dinner.

beCamp 2009

2009-04-03T02:24:00Z

From the website: http://www.barcamp.org/beCamp2009

beCamp May 8th-9th 2009 @ CitySpace, Charlottesville, VA (on Downtown Mall)

If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to miss. beCamp is Charlottesville’s version of the BarCamp unconference phenomenon—organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. Realizing that the most energizing parts of any tech conference are the ad hoc conversations that take place in the hallways between the sessions, beCamp facilitates these types of interactions for an entire event.

...

This is the 3rd year this event is being hosted. I have gone to the two previous conferences and was blown away by the enthusiasm shown by all participants. This year there is a 100 person cap on attendance (as of 3 April, 57 have signed up). I encourage you to visit the beCamp2009 page and sign up.

—Mel

April Meeting: Ben Scofield & Rails Page Caching

2009-04-01T03:01:00Z

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 14 April
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

Over the past year, Rails has gradually (and sometimes quietly) introduced some dramatic new changes. The most obvious of these is the Merb merger, but one of the most important steps on the path to Rails 3.0 was the introduction of Rack support. The effects of that change are wide-ranging, and are often surprising — and include the possibility for new architectures that were impractical or impossible before. Specifically, it is now feasible to build a complex Rails application that can still respond extremely quickly and directly to a specific set of requests, such as those an AJAX service might experience.

Page Caching for your Rails App

In this session, we’ll explore in depth how this strategy reinvigorates a useful, but formerly limited, capability of Rails: page caching. Of the three caching methods built into Rails, page caching is by far the most efficient, but it is also the least flexible. By making use of the Rack support in Rails (with tools like Rails Metal and simple Rack applications), page caching will come into its own as a viable strategy.

Presenter Bio

Ben Scofield is a development director at Viget Labs, where he builds Rails applications for Web 2.0 startups. He’s been using Ruby and Rails for over four years, and is the author of Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects, from Apress. He’s spoken at Railsconf, Rubyconf, Railsconf Europe, and more over the past few years. When he’s not hacking, he spends time with his wife and daughter, reads voraciously, and tries to make the world a better place for web developers everywhere.

RubyNation 2009

2009-04-01T01:40:00Z

RubyNation Early Registration is Open!

RubyNation’s conference organizers are proud to announce that RubyNation, the DC area’s Ruby and Rails developers community conference, is back, bigger and better! This year’s RubyNation will be held June 12-13 in Reston, Virginia.

Early registration is available by clicking here (early pricing is available until April 5th): http://rubynation.eventbrite.com/ or from the web site: http://rubynation.org

This year’s RubyNation conference will feature many luminaries in the Ruby and Rails community, including presentations from Chad Fowler, Hal Fulton, Yehuda Katz, Russ Olsen, David A. Black, and Bruce Tate. Our list of proposal submissions looks awesome, too. We will be publishing the complete list of speakers and a schedule very soon. We have already selected the full list of speakers and are in the process of confirming them, so it won’t be long before we announce them. We will have at least 18 speakers this year, and two lightning talk sessions.

The location will be great, too, the Hyatt Regency Reston. The Hyatt is a first class conference center, with great food, and excellent facilities. It is located in the Reston Town Center, which is full of cool restaurants, bars, and shops, all within a few blocks of the hotel. RubyNation will also be accessible by public transportation via a direct bus link to the West Falls Church metro station to within a few steps of the hotel.

We have worked hard to keep the RubyNation conference affordable and yet improve its quality and accessibility significantly. We hope you’ll agree and join us for RubyNation 2009!

Additional Information

Provided by Keith Bennett

Unlike last year’s venue, this one is easily accessible by public transportation. The 505 bus goes from the West Falls Church station to Reston Town Center. The schedule is at: http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/connector/pdf/Rt_505_556web.pdf

March Meeting Follow-up

2009-03-13T01:45:00Z

Summary

This month’s meeting was a first: two speakers!

Syed Rayhan, of Code71, started off the evening with an architectural overview of his company’s product: ScrumPad. Utilizing Amazon Web Services, ScrumPad is implemented “in the cloud.” He also covered scaling and performance enhancements.

We finished off the night with Kevin Smith, of EngineYard, giving us a brief but engaging look into Erlang. He covered the basics of the bizarre syntax, reliance on pattern matching, and the reuse of concepts within the language.

It was great having both speakers. However, they both had material that would have covered an entire meeting on their own. At this point I don’t think I’ll be scheduling more then one speaker per meeting.

Attendance

We had 13 people at this month’s meeting. The second double-digit attendance. You guys Rock! We even had three brand new faces in attendance. Very encouraging. Please, keep spreading the word.

I would also encourage you to make suggestions on how we can serve your Ruby needs. Remember we have the mailing list and the IRC channel in which to post your questions and suggestions.

Additional Information

Next Meeting

Be sure to come out next month (14 Apr) when Ben Scofield, of Viget Labs, will be talking about Page Caching in Rails.

Announcements

Developer Day is a one-day, developer-centric conference in Durham, NC. And did I mention it’s only Fifty Bucks (USD$50) to register? It’s being held on 21 March, that’s a Saturday if you don’t have a calendar handy.

Also, the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference is once again being held in Philadelphia, PA on 26-27 March. I’ll be posting more information on this conference on the mailing list.

Last but definitely not least I want to say something about tonight’s sponsor: Engine Yard. They were kind enough to pay for this month’s dinner and provide t-shirts for give away.

March's Meeting: Syed Rayhan (ScrumPad) & Kevin Smith (Erlang)

2009-03-06T01:42:00Z

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 10 March
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

We’re pleased to have two speakers for this Month’s meeting. Syed Rayhan, of Code71, will be talking about ScrumPad, a web-based Agile/Scrum project management tool. Plus, Kevin Smith will be up from Raleigh to give us a look at Erlang.

ScrumPad

ScrumPad (http://www.scrumpad.com) is Web-based Agile/Scrum project management and collaboration tool. It was developed on Ruby on Rails as Software as a Service (SaaS). Recently, he migrated ScrumPad from Rails 1.2.x to Rails 2.x. It is deployed in the Amazon cloud (Amazon Web Services, a.k.a. AWS). AWS offers a set of IT infrastructure like compute power, storage, and other as a services. As a result, the cost of infrastructure truly becomes a variable cost. The business applications running on AWS can be dialed up and down to match its fluctuating load in real-time. ScrumPad is using Amzon’s EC2, S3, EBS, and SQS. He will share his experience using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rails migration.

Erlang

The multicore future has arrived and now the only question is: how do we deal with it? Spend an hour learning about Erlang—the functional programming language designed for highly concurrent environments. You’ll get an introduction to Erlang’s major concepts, it’s syntax, and learn which companies are using Erlang today and what kinds of problems they’re solving.

Presenter Bios

Syed Rayhan

After twelve years of designing multi-faceted IT solutions for financial services companies, Syed H. Rayhan, co-founder of Code71, is putting his skills to the test by leading the company to provide a comprehensive suite of development, maintenance, and support services to a growing list of clients.

Syed holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina, Kenan-Flagler Business School, as well as, an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida and an undergraduate degree from BUET (Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology) in Electrical & Electronic Engineering. Syed is a member of the Scrum Alliance and is co-author of Enterprise Java with UML (pub. Wiley & Sons). His current interests is building in Agile fashion Enterprise 2.0 solutions running in the Cloud.

Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith has, at various times, been a network administrator, DBA, developer, team lead and trainer over his 14 year career. He first learned about Erlang in 2006 via Joe Armstrong’s excellent “Programming Erlang” and has never looked back. Kevin is the author of the popular “Erlang In Practice” screencast series and producer of the popular “Hands On Erlang” training class. In his spare time, he is a developer at Engine Yard where he uses Erlang powers only for good.

February Meeting Follow-up

2009-02-11T02:49:00Z

Summary

Erik Hatcher, of Lucid Imagination, came all the way from Charlottesville to school us on some Solr and Lucene. He even did some live coding!

It seemed a number of people’s interest was piqued given the nature of their questions. Even though not many people are currently using Solr, I feel after Erik’s talk they’re thinking about how easy it is to integrate into their app.

Attendance

Did we have the largest turn out? Definitely for this year! We had a total 17 people at tonight’s meeting; 7 from Cville (this includes Erik). You guys Rock! We had 6 brand new faces attend. Definitely keep spreading the word.

I would also encourage you to make suggestions on how we can serve your Ruby needs. Remember we have the mailing list and the IRC channel in which to post your questions and suggestions.

Additional Information

Here are some links where you can get some additional information:

http://www.lucidimagination.com/

http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Next Meeting

Be sure to come out next month (10 Mar) when we’ll have two speakers: Erlang, ScrumPad. I’ll post additional information in a separate posting.

Announcement

Last but definitely not least I want to say something about tonight’s sponsor: Engine Yard. They were kind enough to pay for this month’s dinner and provide t-shirts for give away. They’re also going to pick up March’s food bill and more t-shirts will be given away.

February's Meeting: Erik Hatcher & Solr/Lucene

2009-02-04T05:11:00Z

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 10 Febraruy
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

Solr brings enterprise-scale search to the masses, building upon the powerful Lucene search library. Interacting with Solr through HTTP makes developing applications in any language or environment straightforward. This talk will demonstrate Solr from the ground up: indexing data, searching it, faceting, highlighting, spellchecking and more. After covering Solr fundamentals, and demonstrating its features live through the command-line and browser, we’ll delve into working with Solr through Ruby, using the solr-ruby library and also discussing the current state of the acts_as_solr ActiveRecord plugin and the work being done with the new RSolr (a solr-ruby refactoring replacement) project, and we’ll also see examples of Flare (a dusty RoR plugin) and other techniques for getting Solr integrated into your applications. After all of the flashy cool stuff, we’ll discuss production considerations for deploying Solr for real such as scaling via replication and distributed search.

Solr for your Rails App

If you’re considering adding search capabilities to your Rails app, do yourself a favor: come out and learn what Solr can do for your application. There are a number of sites/apps using Solr in the ‘real world’.

Come get your search on!

Presenter Bio

Erik Hatcher codes, writes, and speaks about all things Solr, a Lucene-powered search server. He co-authored “Lucene in Action”, has spoken at numerous technical conferences and user groups around the world, and has consulted with many big name organizations. Erik works for Lucid Imagination, a full-service Lucene/Solr shop.

January Meeting Follow-up

2009-01-14T05:03:00Z

Summary

I’d like to extend a heart-felt thanks to Eric Pugh. It was a great meeting with a lot of interaction and a ton of information. Hopefully Eric will agree to come back and present again.

As soon as I get his slides I’ll make them available either here or in the Google Group (or both).

Attendance

We had 5 new people this evening. Wow! I know that I’m very grateful you guys took time out of your busy schedules to attend the meeting. Spread the word!

I would also encourage you to make suggestions on how we can serve your Ruby needs. Remember we have the mailing list and the IRC channel in which to post your questions and suggestions.

Additional Information

We didn’t get a chance to cover other CI options; we covered Cruisecontrol.rb and Hudson. However, here are three more options:

I don’t have any direct experience using them. If you do please leave a comment with your impressions of them.

Next Meeting

Be sure to come out next month (10 Feb) when Erik Hatcher will speak about Solr/Lucene. I’ll post additional information in a separate posting.

Announcement

In the vein of brotherly user group goodness, I’d like to pass along that the RJUG is having Jared Richardson present his Careers 2.0 talk. It’s Wednesday night, 14 January. More details can be found here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1440576/

January's Meeting: Eric Pugh & Continuous Integration

2009-01-10T04:41:00Z

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 13 January
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

Continous Integration Automation should be a key part of your tools, especially in team environments. Come learn a bit about about CI and a lot about CruiseControl.rb. You’ll see how easy it is to get started, and some of the great integration of metrics tools such as Flog, Heckle, and RCov… Don’t you want to say you flogged your code?

Continuous Integration

Come join us as we learn about Continuous Integration, why it’s important to your project, and a few of the options and supporting tools available to us Ruby Developers. We have Eric Pugh, of Open Source Connections in Charlottesville, coming in to share his experience and expertise on CI. Though I had heard of CruiseControl prior to working with Mr. Pugh, it was he that really sold me on the idea of CI and CruiseControl; that was back in the day when I was slinging Java code.

Presenter Bio

Eric Pugh, Principal, OpenSource Connections

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a committer on many projects including DBUnit, Maven, and Jakarta Commons.

In biotech, financial services and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. As a speaker at conferences including ApacheCon and OSCON, he has emphasized the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

OpenSource Connections is a consulting group that provides enterprise-level support for open source solutions. Focusing on convergent information systems, OpenSource Connections helps companies find ways to optimize information and resources.