Posted by Gray Herter
Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:09:00 GMT
The next meeting of the NovaRUG will be held Wednesday, Apr 15th at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. The presentation will start at 7 PM.
Register:Register Here to RSVP. Please make sure to register since this should generate a lot of interest. I will make sure the HVAC is left on this year!
Topic: We don't know, but with Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas presenting it will be worth your while to attend. I heard that they plan to examine some code in detail.
Speakers: Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, the famous authors of the Pickaxe Ruby book that we all have on our desk. They are also teaching an upcoming Rails class in Reston, April 15-17.
Sponsors: Food and drink will be provided starting at 6:30, pizza courtesy of CodeSherpas.
Sodas (and the room) from FGM, as usual.
Cookies and brownies from RubyNation (hey, we don't have to buy pizza this time!).
Jetbrains: We will also give out a Jetbrains license, good for ReSharper Personal License, dotTrace Personal
License, IntelliJ IDEA Personal License, TeamCity Build Agent (their
Continuous Integration and Build Server), or RubyMine (new Ruby IDE).
Location: FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building.
Posted by Gray Herter
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:04:00 GMT
The next meeting of the NovaRUG will be held Tuesday, Mar 31st at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentation will start at 7 PM.
Register Here (just take the poll so we know how much pizza to buy):
Topic: Bryan will review his toolbox for acceptance testing Ruby web applications. This presentation
will be a demonstration of how to get the most out of your acceptance tests. Bryan will talk about Cucumber, Webrat, Webrat with Cucumber, Integrity, his environment and then share a list of other resources.
We have some T-shirts to give out (Radrails/RubyNation), and some Radrails books, too.
Speaker: "Only write code to make your tests pass." A simple statement for many, but a way of life for Bryan Liles. Writing tests and blogging, speaking, and demonstrating everything associated is a passion that Bryan expends way too much time evangelizing. Bryan started his professional life as a Unix admin and has slowly realized that writing code was his passion, so now he spends all his time hacking on the latest and greatest technologies.
Location: FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building.
Posted by Gray Herter
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:07:00 GMT
The meeting will be held Wednesday, Nov 19th at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentation will start at 7 PM.
Topic:Ramaze (http://ramaze.net) is a simple, light and modular open-source web application framework written in Ruby.
Even though Ramaze hasn't been in the spotlight as
much as Merb and Sinatra, it has a lot to offer:
Like Merb, it lets you select from a variety of ORMs and templating engines
Ramaze is developed in a BDD fashion with specs written in Bacon.
The documentation and examples from the site are very good and the code is easy to dig into.
The community is very friendly and helpful
This talk is an introduction to Ramaze and show why you should consider
it for your next project.
We have some T-shirts to give out (Ramaze and Radrails), and some Radrails books, too.
Speaker: Luc Castera is a curious software engineer, always trying to learn new
technologies and improve his
skills. He is currently the lead-developer behind ShareMeme.com and
has held positions at Verizon,
GE, and Delphi Electronics. He has used many different languages and
platforms such as Java, Tcl/Tk,
C, Ruby, and C#/.NET throughout his career. He discovered Ruby two
years ago and has been a big fan
ever since.
Luc received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of
Virginia before attending
Georgia Tech to obtain his Masters degree in the same field. Born and
raised in Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, he now lives in the DC Metropolitan area.
Location: FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building
Posted by Gray Herter
Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:04:00 GMT
Bring your Ruby Newbie friends to the Sept NovaRUG meeting, where we will hold a Ruby Newbie night to introduce new folks to the Ruby universe.
The meeting will be held Wednesday, Sept 17th at the FGM
headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentations will start at 7 PM.
The meeting will be sponsored by EclipseWorld
, who has graciously offered to let us give out a pass to their upcoming conference (Oct 28-30 at the Hyatt Reston) at our meeting. They also have $200 discounts available to us, just use the code, NOVARUG2 when registering.
The speakers will be a mix of folks who have all offered to provide brief introductions to various Ruby related topics. The speakers include Russ Olsen and Gray Herter of FGM, Keith Bennett of Bennett Business Solutions, and Dave Bock and Arild Shirazi of CodeSherpas (and maybe you, too, if you want to join us with a topic).
The meeting will not be a Ruby class, but rather a brief introduction to several of the main features of the language, along with some demonstrations and testimonials on the usefulness of Ruby. The meeting will be informal with questions and tangents welcomed.
We will start with an introduction to Ruby basics up to the point of creating a class in Ruby given by Russ Olsen. Then Gray Herter will provide an short introduction to container objects in Ruby (arrays and hashes), plus regular expression handling, and ranges. Arild Shirazi will explain Ruby blocks, iterators, procs and lambdas. Dave Bock will demonstrate some dynamic Ruby. And Keith Bennett will wrap it up with an explanation of what he loves about Ruby.
Additional topics are welcomed if you want to propose one. It doesn't have to be strictly about the Ruby language. Any short topic that you think might pique the interest of someone curious about Ruby is fair game. If you want to give a short intro to RSpec or rake, or whatever, just let us know. But remember that each presentation should be limited to what can be covered comfortable in 10 minutes or so (we only have 2 hours!), so think 'lightning talk'. Explaining Rails is out, too big a subject! But maybe showing an example of Rails scaffolding could work (Hey Look, just one command and you get FOUR web pages!). You decide and we will listen.
And don't forget to bring your Ruby Newbie friends.
Here is the address:
FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will
let you in to the building
Posted by Tom Copeland
Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:43:00 GMT
The June NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, June 18 at the FGM
headquarters from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.
FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will
let you in to the building
The meeting will be sponsored by RosettaStone
, who has graciously offered to buy the pizza (They are hiring Ruby
developers right now, BTW).
Also we will give out a door prize of a pass to the RubyNation.
The speakers will be Chris Bucchere of BDG and Arild Shirazi of FGM.
The first speaker will be Chris Bucchere who will speak on "To Portal or
Not To Portal -- How to Build DRY, Truly Modular Mashups in Rails".
Those with a background in portal software know that portals make it
remarkably easy to mashup data/content and applications from various
sources into on composite web site. But do you really need a potentially
expensive and complicated off-the-shelf portal to do this? Or is it
possible to build a composite application using Rails, partials and the
embed_action plugin? Come hear how a portal-industry veteran and
developer of one of the most widely-used enterprise portals built a
social networking site in Rails using a portal product and then, with a
little reorganization of the Ruby code, removed the portal product
altogether. Did chaos ensue or was the finished product even better
without the portal? More than just a compare-and-contrast look at Rails
inside of a portal environment and out, this talk will dive deep into
the Rails view and layout architecture to show how to aggregate content
in a DRY, no-fuss manner.
The second speaker will be Arild Shirazi who will speak on "CSS for the
Developer". Arild will talk from a developer's perspective about the
black art of CSS. Anyone can waste hours trying to get the web page
looking (almost|just) perfect. Hopefully, I will provide some insight
into creating layout and design in an easy and maintainable way. Along
the way we'll discuss alternatives to the dreaded <table> layout, and
guiding principles to help keep your web content (HTML) separate from
the presentation (CSS).
Posted by Xandy Johnson
Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:55:00 GMT
The November NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, November 28 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.
Patrick Joyce will be speaking on Liquid, a templating language which allows dynamic information to be securely exposed to designers. It was extracted from the e-commerce system Shopify where it is used to safely theme 20,000 different online stores. Liquid is also used as the templating language for the Mephisto blogging system and for the Stikipad hosted wiki service. The talk will discuss when using Liquid makes sense, why it is necessary, and how to incorporate Liquid templates into your application.
Keith Forsythe will be presenting "Anatomy of an Agile Iteration: a RideCharge Case Study." RideCharge is a Rails app. developed using Agile practices including two week iterations, with an
iteration planning meeting, assignments, daily scrums, wiki task
updates, bug tracking, and so on.
Patrick Joyce is the co-founder of SandwichBoard, LLC a startup working to make web based marketing accessible to independent restaurants. He blogs at http://pragmati.st
Keith Forsythe is a founder and Director of Product Development at RideCharge, a service that allows business travelers to book, pay, and expense ground transportation through the web and smart phones.
