Posted by Gray Herter
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:04:00 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.
Built on top of jQuery, jQuery UI is a complete set of behaviors and components for building Rich Internet Applications. Drag-and-drop, resizing, sorting, selecting, dialogs, sliders, tabs, trees, grids, toolbars, menus, etc. Each component adheres to a consistent standard across API, design, behavior and theming, minimizing surprise and making learning all of them as easy as learning one. jQuery UI has full cross-browser support, is designed for easy customizing and extensibility, and is fully themable with a widget-ready CSS Framework.
Richard D. Worth is one of the lead developers of jQuery UI, a component framework built on top of jQuery, designed to make Rich Internet Applications as refreshingly simple as jQuery has made Ajax. Richard works at Fulcrum IT on Web services contracts, primarily for the government, and blogs at rdworth.org.
When: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 06:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Where:
FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Directions here
Posted by Gray Herter
Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:39:00 GMT
CANCELLED: The weather report for tomorrow isn't good, so we will try this one again later.
The next meeting of the NovaRUG will be held Wednesday, Jan 28th 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. WARNING: There might be the occasional use of the F word in this presentation (considering that is what the F in TATFT represents). So please bring your sense of humor and leave the kids at home.
Register Here (just take the poll so we know how much pizza to buy):
Topic:You've heard it a million times, "TATFT". So, how do you go from being someone who wants to test, to someone who actually tests all the time? Do you need a spiritual guide who can show you the intricacies of testing, and how it can make your code better? If so, you need "TATFT, the laymen's guide to getting it right the first time."
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, 12 Dec 2008 00:05:00 GMT
The meeting will be held Wednesday, Dec 17th at the FGM headquarters (directions) 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.
Git is a free distributed revision control, or software source code management project with an emphasis on being fast. Git was initially created by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development.
Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server.
Several high-profile software projects now use Git for revision control[4], most notably the Linux kernel, Samba, X.org Server, Qt (toolkit), One Laptop per Child (OLPC) core development[5], Ruby on Rails web framework [6], VLC, Merb, Wine, SWI Prolog, DragonFly BSD and the Android mobile platform.
The screencast itself is an hour long, and we may interrupt it from time to time for questions, clarifications, etc.
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
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:07:00 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
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:32:00 GMT
No, it is not a night of progressive Canadian rock music! It's two great ruby talks, one on the rush shell by Nicholas Schlueter and another on cucumber, a BDD framework, by Chris Flipse.
RSVP with the pizza poll (whether you want pizza or not), so we know how much to get and how many are coming.
rush (http://rush.heroku.com/) as defined by the website is a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby
syntax. Grep through files,
find and kill processes, copy files - everything you do in the shell,
now in Ruby.
In this talk you will learn 2 things.
First we will go over some rush basics. Like globbing, search and
replace, naming files, and
processes.
Second we will add rush to common tools, such as, Rake, Sake,
Textmate, Capistrano, and Thor.
The Cucumber talk will be: "a bit of a talk about Cucumber, which will be the replacement for the story framework in rspec." by Chris Flipse. Stay tuned for more details as they arrive, or just show up and be surprised.
The meeting will be held Thursday, Oct 16th 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.
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 Gray Herter
Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:04:00 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 Gray Herter
Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:48:00 GMT
The August NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, August 27th at the FGM
headquarters from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and soft drinks start at 6:30.
The speaker will be Chris Williams of Iterative Designs.
The meeting is sponsored by EclipseWorld.
An indepth technical discussion about concurrency and why it matters
in modern web and general programming environments. With the upcoming
Ruby 1.9 release and Rails 2.2/3.0 with thread safety, concurrency
should be on the mind of every Ruby programmer. This talk will go into
a discussion of what the different types of threads are, what
precautions or advice you should carry with you as you write
concurrent code, and why you should be looking into other
fundamentally different languages (like erlang or scala) for long
running, complex, and multi faceted requests. Topics will include
Fuzed and why it represents an exciting shift in hosting options and a
telnet chat client, which will be used as a backchannel during the
demonstration. The goal is not to scary you, but to help you see the
forest despite the concurrent trees.
The meeting will be sponsored by EclipseWorld
, who has graciously offered to buy the pizza and provide a free giveaway pass to their fine conference, coming Oct 28-30 to a Reston Hyatt near you! They will have several presentations featuring Ruby, a sure sign of great things to come for our favorite computer language. Check the link out, they have lots of other topics besides a few Rails/Ruby talks, PHP, and lots of Java stuff, for instance (hey, they have to pay the bills).
And we have a Ruby book to give away, too.
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 19:43:00 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).
