NovaRUG: Category Meetings

Jan 25: Two Talks: Metaprogramming and Section 508 Compliance

Gray Herter — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:47:00 -0500

Two Talks: Metaprogramming and Section 508 Compliance

Register: Click here for details and to register.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012, 6:30 PM - 9 PM Presentations at 7 PM

Location: Near Infinity Corporation 1881 Campus Commons Drive #203, Reston, VA

First Talk: Jessie Link from General Dynamics will present on the ins and outs of 508 Compliance.

Second Talk: Metaprogramming - Ruby Through the Looking Glass

Arild Shirazi's last project required state-based permissions. Cancan and similar gems did not provide the power or flexibility I was seeking in a DSL. Writing permissions checks by hand throughout the controllers and views is not a maintainable solution. How hard can it be to write your own domain specific language?

Not that bad once you understand closures, class_eval, instance_eval and metaprograming hooks like #included(base). I will go over some of these basics as we build our own authentication DSL. The goal is to demystify the Ruby magic and make it accessible for your needs.

Arild is a long time Rubyist who works for CodeSherpas.

Sponsor: This meetup is sponsored by Near Infinity Corp.

Also RubyNation, an awesome Ruby conference in Reston, VA, is coming up March 23-24.

Sept 22: Reek and Static Analysis of Ruby Code by Andrew Wagner

Gray Herter — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:20:00 -0400

Title: Reek and Static Analysis of Ruby Code by Andrew Wagner

Register: Click Here to Register!

When: Thurs Sept 22, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM (Presentation at 7)

Sponsor: Pizza and drinks will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation. Be sure to check out the course listings for the NIC training room. There is an iPhone class coming up next week!

Talk Description: Reek and Static Analysis of Ruby Code: Since ruby is such a dynamic language, how much can we tell about it statically? Can we get hints about parts of our design that need improving? We can, and reek is a great tool for this. Reek bills itself as the code smell detector for Ruby! We'll talk about its features, gotchas, future, and even its internals.

Speaker:Andrew Wagner is a software developer with over 5 years experience. He's been doing ruby and rails programming for Near Infinity for the past year and a half. He presented at Near Infinity's spring conference on the ruby object model, and just recently gave this talk on reek there. Andrew uses reek at work where they have the cleanest code in town!

Near Infinity
1881 Campus Commons Drive Suite 203
Reston, VA 20191

Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking out in front of the building or in the garage behind it.

Jul 21: CoffeeScript by Scott Leberknight

Gray Herter — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:11:00 -0400

Title: CoffeeScript by Scott Leberknight

Register: Click Here to Register!

When: Thurs Jul 21, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM (Presentation at 7)

Food: Food and Drink will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation.

Talk Description: CoffeeScript by Scott Leberknight: Scott Leberknight will take a break from his recent immersions into the depths of Hadoop and Hive long enough to reprise his excellent CoffeeScript presentation, which he presented at NIC-U's Spring technical conference in April. Scott is the Chief Architect at Near Infinity Corporation.

Near Infinity
1881 Campus Commons Drive Suite 203
Reston, VA 20191

Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking out in front of the building or in the garage behind it.

Feb 3: UI Fever! Haml, Sass and Compass (moved!)

Gray Herter — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 09:24:00 -0500

Title: UI Fever! Haml, Sass and Compass (postponed due to bad weather from Jan 26th)

Register: Click Here to Register!

When: Thurs Feb 3, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Food: Food and Drink will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation.

Description: This night's NovaRUG takes a walk down UI lane. Dave Bock will expound on the importance of semantic markup, a feat he makes easy with Compass and Sass. And then its all about the Hamiltons, baby! (Haml, that is) by Gray Herter. Other UI related topics are welcomed, too. BYO laser pointer.

Location: This will be in NIC's new training room, which is huge and awesome.

Near Infinity
1881 Campus Commons Drive Suite 203
Reston, VA 20191

Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking out in front of the building or in the garage behind it.

Don't forget about the RubyNation conference, coming up this April 1-2. Early Registration is up now, and the Call for Presentations is open until the end of January.

NovaJS Tomorrow Night at NIC

Gray Herter — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 09:59:00 -0500

Since we are in the midst of the holiday season, and every (me included) is suddenly busy busy, we will forgo a regular December meeting. Instead, I encourage people to go to the NovaJS meeting which is tomorrow night at NIC. We all need to get smart on JavaScript anyway. ;^)

When: Wednesday Dec 8, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM)

Register: Click here to register!

Food: Food and Drink will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation.

Nov 30: Callbacks in Rails3 by Neeraj Singh

Gray Herter — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:10:00 -0500

Title: Neeraj Singh on Callbacks in Rails3

When: Tuesday Nov 30, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Register: Click here to register!

Food: Food and Drink will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation.

Description: Callbacks are important part of Rails. It is used everywhere from before_filter in controller to after_destroy in ActiveRecord.

Callback code has undergone a lot of change in Rails3. Beside discussing the changes from Rails2, the presentation would go in detail how exactly Rails3 made callbacks faster.

The talk will also discuss a few things to watch out for while declaring callbacks on ActiveRecord.

Neeraj Singh is a Ruby on Rails contributor, jquery-ujs contributor, jQuery hacker and a web developer.

Location:

This will be in NIC's new training center, which is huge and awesome.

Near Infinity HQ
1881 Campus Commons Drive Suite 203 (training center)
Reston, VA 20191

Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking out in front of the building or in the garage behind it.

Oct 21: Rails Engines and Lightning Talks

Gray Herter — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 14:54:00 -0400

Title: Lighning Talks

When: Thursday Oct 21, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Register: Cick here!

Food: Food and Drink will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation.

Description: To celebrate the NovaRUG's 50th meeting (yup, 50!), we will open the floor to lightning talks on whatever subject you want to talk about. As an added incentive, we will vote, and the winner will get a speaking slot at RubyNation 2011 including a free pass to the conference. RubyNation will be held April 1st and 2nd next year.

The Awesome Power of Rails Engines by Sean Schofield (20 minutes) - Rails Engines on GitHub
The admin_data Gem by Neeraj Singh (10 minutes)
Dave Keener (5 minutes)
git-based Capistrano deployments by Anthony Burns (5 minutes)
Rack by Scott Leberknight (5 minutes)
Ruby Refactoring by Camille Bell (10-15 minutes)
FasterCSV gem by Charles Calvert
CoffeeScript by Ryan McGeary (5-10 minutes)
Linux administration with Ruby! by Keith Bennett

Some talks will be more lightning than others, so you can speak longer than 5 minutes if you want. If I know how much time the speaker wants I will make a note of it. Email me at gray dot herter @ gmail.com and I will put your information up here, or just show up and speak.

Location:

This will be in NIC's new training center, which is huge and awesome.

Near Infinity HQ
1881 Campus Commons Drive Suite 203 (training center)
Reston, VA 20191

Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking out in front of the building or in the garage behind it.

Resources:

Sean's presentation is here: http://awesome-engines.heroku.com/
Sean's github is here: Cick here!

Location:

Near Infinity HQ
1881 Campus Commons Drive Suite 205
Reston, VA 20191
Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking out in front of the building or in the garage behind it.

Food: Pizza and Sodas will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation.

Description: This talk is a distillation of some of the practical tactics that Dave's development team at MetroStar Systems has used to create highly successful FaceBook applications using Rails, including real-life systems like PollCast and Iran Voices. Facebook is the world's largest social network, with over 400 million members. The talk also discusses the ramifications of the latest game-changing announcements from Facebook's F8 Conference and how these changes are affecting Facebook development.

The second talk will be a quick presentation by Dave Bock on using RVM and Gemsets to better organize your projects.

Speaker Bio: David Keener is a solutions architect for MetroStar Systems, a fast-growing consulting firm in the Washington DC metropolitan area providing services to government agencies, non-profit organizations and the commercial sector. Dave has over 23 years of experience, specializing in Ruby, Rails, social media and (sometimes) even Java. He is a frequent public speaker at user groups and conferences, as well as a founder of the RubyNation Conference. He also blogs regularly on Internet-related subjects at KeenerTech.com.

Dave Bock is a principal at CodeSherpas, a software consultancy based in Northern Virginia that has been doing a lot of Rails work since 2006.

Aug 19: MySQL Performance for Rails + Rails 3 Arel

Gray Herter — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:12:00 -0400

Title: MySQL Performance for Rails: the New Reality by Baron Schwartz

Matt Wizeman will also present a short (15 minutes or so) overview of Arel, Rails 3's new relational algebra library.

When: Thursday Aug 19, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (Presentation at 6:45, so be on time!)

Register: Cick here!

Location:

InfoEther, Inc. HQ's Building
11600 Sunrise Valley Drive
Suite 490
Reston, Virginia 20191 USA

Location URL: http://www.infoether.com/contact

Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking out in front of the building.

Food: Pizza and Sodas will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation with special thanks to InfoEther for providing the location.

Description:

MySQL today is an entirely different beast than it was two years ago. Recent improvements have increased performance dramatically. I'm not a shill for MySQL, but I often see decisions that are no longer necessary or even wise: sharding prematurely, moving away from MySQL, not buying powerful hardware -- all out of the once-true belief that MySQL could not run with the big dogs. Given the new reality of multicore hardware, solid-state storage, and vast amounts of RAM, what should you be doing today with MySQL to build large-scale apps that perform well? We'll talk about hardware, tuning, what's new in MySQL 5.1 and beyond, and what's specific to Rails apps. And yes, there ARE still parts of MySQL that don't scale well, and we'll discuss how to
sidestep them.

Speaker Bio:

Baron Schwartz is an expert on MySQL and LAMP performance and scalability. He's the Chief Performance Architect at Percona, where he helps customers architect and build some of the largest LAMP applications around. He is the lead author of High Performance MySQL. He has created several popular open-source software projects, including Maatkit. He posts regularly on the MySQL Performance Blog and the Xaprb blog.

July 14: Radiant CMS: How to Understand, Use, and Extend It by Jim Gay

Gray Herter — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:15:00 -0400

Title: Radiant CMS: How to Understand, Use, and Extend It by Jim Gay

Register: Click here!

When: Weds July 14, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Location:

Near Infinity HQ
1881 Campus Commons Drive Suite 205
Reston, VA 20191
Call 703 727-1307 (Gray's cell phone) if you have trouble getting in.

Parking: There is plenty of parking in the garage or out in front of the building.

Food: Pizza and Sodas will be provided by Near Infinity Corporation.

Description:

Take a walk through Radiant, one of the most popular Ruby content management systems in an exploration of the features and extension system.

In this discussion, we'll see the basics of content management with Radiant and talk about what it provides out of the box. Jim Gay, the lead developer of the project, will show off the latest release which has features for

internationalization
loading extensions from gems
updated user interface

He'll discuss peering into the way requests are routed to pages, using radiant with your other rails projects, extending the interface, and some common anti-patterns.

Speaker Bio:

Jim Gay is the founder of Saturn Flyer LLC, a design and development studio that bridges the gap between graphic designers and application developers.

Prior to founding Saturn Flyer he was a Senior Web Developer with WFI (now Kratos Defense & Security Solutions) where he lead UI development and wrote guidelines for application interface design and was the resident Section 508 expert.

He has been developing Ruby on Rails applications since 2006 and is the lead developer of Radiant CMS.