NovaRUG: Category Meetings

June meeting

Tom Copeland — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:43:00 -0500

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

Directions

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).

May Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:42:00 -0500

The May NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, May 21 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.

Chris Flipse will be presenting on distributed version control systems, particularly git.

Michael Furr will be presenting on a Ruby type system.

RideCharge will be sponsoring the pizza.

April Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:19:00 -0500

The April NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, April 16 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.

Paul Barry will be presenting on Merb, a lightweight MVC framework.

Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmers will present on the Ruby Object model and how it facilitates metaprogramming.

RideCharge will be sponsoring the pizza.

Please RSVP, the room only holds 100 people!

March Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:30:00 -0600

The March NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, March 19 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.

David Keener will be presenting on OpenID and Rails. OpenID is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet

Leigh Sullivan of RideCharge will present on Watir ("Web Application Testing in Ruby"), a simple open-source library for automating web browsers.

No December Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:37:45 -0600

I regret that there will be no meeting this month. We hope to return in January.

November Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:55:00 -0600

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.

October Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:40:00 -0500

The October NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, October 17 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30. Pizza will be sponsored by Blue Collar Objects

Ray Daly will be speaking on microformats.

September Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:32:00 -0500

The September NovaRUG meeting will happen Wednesday, September 19 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.

Evan Light will be talking about Behavior Driven Development with RSpec and Dave Bock may be talking about how to use httperf to measure your application performance.

August Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:31:00 -0500

The August NovaRUG meeting will happen Wednesday, August 22 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.

Rodney Degracia will be talking about RubyCLR. Lest the platform representation of the evening be one-sided, Evan Light will be talking about RubyOSA and rb-appscript.

July Meeting

Xandy Johnson — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:51:00 -0500

The July NovaRUG meeting will happen Wednesday, July 18 at the FGM headquarters (directions) from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza, sponsored by Viget Labs, and drinks start at 6:30.

Matt Scilipoti will be talking about using Rails with legacy databases. We'll also be having two lightning talks: (1) Devin Mullins on Haml and Sass, and (2) Patrick Reagan on mocking libraries in Ruby.