NovaRUG

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.

RubyNation is the March Meeting

Gray Herter — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:21:00 -0400

Since RubyNation is April 1 and 2, it will suffice as the March meeting. I hope you have a ticket already, because it sold out last week. We will pick up the regular schedule with a meeting in April near the end of the month.

Feb 24: Introducing Rack and Code Coverage Tools

Gray Herter — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:41:00 -0500

Title: Introducing Rack and Code Coverage Tools

Register: Click Here to Register!

When: Thurs Feb 24, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM (Presentation at 7)

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

First Talk Description: A quick overview of the ruby4kids program and the Pario gem by William Davenport.

Second Talk Description: Introducing Rack by Ammar Yousef: Ammar is a software engineer at FGM Inc, he's been doing Rails for 4 years now and been writing code for about 11. He owns a site called Shoutreel.com, which helps people easily record and share their life's moments via short videos. He's going to be giving an introduction on Rack, a middleware interface that sits between Ruby applications and HTTP-speaking Web servers like, Phusion Passenger, Litespeed, Mongrel, Thin, and Webrick. He will go through the basics and also demo a simple Hello Rack application.

Third Talk Description: Cover Me: The Inside Scoop on Code Coverage Tools for Rails 2.3.x and Rails 3 by Dave Keener: You produce code. You create tests. But are you covering everything you need to cover? Code coverage tools like rcov and simplecov provide insight into how complete your tests really are. You may be surprised at some of the gaps in your tests, such as edge cases and failure conditions that aren't being tested. Find out how to analyze your codebase, whether it's a Rails 2.3.x legacy app or a bright and shiny Rails 3 app.

Location: This will be in NIC's training room.

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 open now.

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.