Please join us on 9 Dec to hear Jim Van Fleet, CVREG creator, talk about maintaining one’s balance in an environment where competing factors can easily overwhelm.

Being a developer is all about balance. Balancing code quality, testing coverage, business and client needs, performance in production, and working with other’s code in an environment of rapid and significant change is why we get paid the big bucks. But what happens when that balance is upset?

Jim Van Fleet, Community Developer from TradeKing, will take a look at this question and offer some tips to help you keep your project on the right track to deliver a successful launch during development so that you aren’t scrambling when that first wave of new users hits.

After Jim’s presentation I’d like to open the meeting to you. Let us know how your Ruby year progressed.

Can be found on Upcoming.com: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1403823/

In a couple of weeks we’re going to have the last meeting of the year. Jim Van Fleet has graciously accepted our invitation to give a talk; details will follow in a separate post. However, I would also like to invite anyone and everyone to give their Ruby Retrospective during the meeting.

What is a Ruby Retrospective, you may ask. Well I’d like to know what you did with Ruby in 2008. I’ll share my Ruby adventures; I’ll also share my Ruby plans for next year. Side-projects, for-pay-projects, web apps, SA utilities, what ever.

I’d also like to hear suggestions for meeting topics. Which reminds me – I’ll also be posting some of next year’s schedule. We have some excellent talks planned out to April.

Look for the next couple of posts to detail next month’s meeting and the 2009 schedule, as it exists today.

Cheers, Mel

Due to a highly infectious group (many of us are laid out with the cold), we’ll be rescheduling our current guest if possible. We have lots planned for the next few months so please keep an eye on the site or upcoming group!

Hope everyone has a great Turkey day!

Abstract

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.

Bio

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.

Good News Everybody!

Save the Date: Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference

Technical awareness and use of Ruby is skyrocketing, allowing it to quickly become the most prominent, intriguing, and dynamic programming language around. This conference will introduce you to leading Addison-Wesley Ruby and Rails authors who are living and breathing these ground-breaking technologies every day. Experience exciting keynotes, stimulating conference sessions and case studies, with lots of time built in for informational discussions networking and code sharing. Click below to learn more about joining us November 17-20 in Boston. http://www.voicesthatmatter.com/ruby2008/

Overview

James Foster of GemStone will be in town to give his talk about MagLev and GLASS[1] for our October meeting.

From his website you can read about, and view videos, of his Road Show. He’s visited the Midwest and he’s in our area for a while before heading to OOPSLA.

Presentation

In this presentation, James Foster will give a brief demo of MagLev, then introduce Smalltalk, GemStone/S (a Smalltalk implementation that has built-in persistence and multi-user, multi-machine scalability), and the web framework Seaside. We will see how Seaside handles the “Back button problem” and provides a rich, component-based approach to OO web development.

James’ Bio

While in junior high in 1971, James Foster discovered computers at the local university and has delighted in building things and sharing his discoveries ever since. He learned Smalltalk in the mid-1990s, and became a passionate advocate for object technologies and agile methods. James is on the Smalltalk Engineering team at GemStone Systems, Inc., and regularly presents on technical topics (last month at ESUG in Amsterdam and next month at OOPSLA in Nashville).

I pulled the presentation and bio details from James’ website. The full article can be found here: http://programminggems.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/september-road-show/ I encourage you to read the entire post if you’ve not heard of Seaside, Smalltalk, GemStone or MagLev.

¹ ”GLASS” is an acronym for GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, and Smalltalk.

Coming up September 30th, Rich Kilmer, Marcel Molina and Mark Gardner from InfoEhter will be the main speakers. The meeting is in Harrisonburg. Head out to meetup to signup or for more information http://ruby.meetup.com/128/

Tuesday Aug 11. We’ll be meeting at the Strategy Cafe offices (there’s a map at upcoming) and headed over to the Triple for libations, conversations, and pool.

Hope to see you there!

let us know your coming