February 2010 Meetup
February 5th, 2010
Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) on Monday, 15 February 2010 at 7pm, for the postponed from January inaugural meeting of the 2010 NHRuby season. This year at NHRuby, we’re going to try something a little different. Mixed in with our usual presentations, we’ll be covering the fundamentals of Ruby beginning with Object Oriented Programming (OOP).
New Hampshire local, Brian Turnbull, will be leading a hands-on class covering the fundamentals of OOP (Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Dynamic Binding) with special emphasis on OOP in Ruby. We’ll cover the why and how of writing object oriented code in Ruby and touch on designing larger systems using OOP principles. In addition, if the stock Array type is not cutting it for you, we’ll cover creating your own types and learn what makes a complete class in Ruby. But wait! There’s more! It’s not all talk—we’ll finish the meeting with an application of what you learned though a programming exercise designed to flex those new OOP filled brain cells.
So if you have some programming background, but have been wondering what all this hubbub about objects is, join us. Or you want translate your OOP knowledge to Ruby, this is the meetup for you. If you are already fluent in OOP, you’re welcome and encouraged to help guide the session and assist other members… plus there will be an extra credit challenge in the form of a Ruby game during the programming exercise!
January 2010 Meetup Canceled
January 18th, 2010
We're canceling tonight's meeting.
The snow is letting up, however the roads are a mess and our host, RMC Research, has closed their offices for the day. The next NHRuby meeting will be Monday, 15 February 2010 — same topic, Object Oriented Programming.
January 2010 Meetup
January 11th, 2010
MEETUP CANCELED — Due to snowy weather and slippery roads.
Happy New Year!
Join us at RMC Research on Monday, 18 January 2010 at 7pm, for the inaugural meeting of the 2010 NHRuby season. This year at NHRuby, we're going to try something a little different. Mixed in with our usual presentations, we'll be covering the fundamentals of Ruby beginning with Object Oriented Programming (OOP).
New Hampshire local, Brian Turnbull, will be leading a hands-on class covering the fundamentals of OOP (Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Dynamic Binding) with special emphasis on OOP in Ruby. We'll cover the why and how of writing object oriented code in Ruby and touch on designing larger systems using OOP principles. In addition, if the stock Array type is not cutting it for you, we'll cover creating your own types and learn what makes a complete class in Ruby. But wait! There's more! It's not all talk -- we'll finish the meeting with an application of what you learned though a programming exercise designed to flex those new OOP filled brain cells.
So if you have some programming background, but have been wondering what all this hubbub about objects is, join us. Or you want translate your OOP knowledge to Ruby, this is the meetup for you. If you are already fluent in OOP, you're welcome and encouraged to help guide the session and assist other members... plus there will be an extra credit challenge in the form of a Ruby game during the programming exercise!
November 2009 Meeting Recap
November 19th, 2009
Thank you to all that came out for our last meeting of 2009. If you couldn't make it, check out the slide decks from Brian Turnbull's presentation (embedded below) on the Ruby Version Manager and Nick Plante's presentation on Amazon EC2 and Rubber. Finally, Ted Roche has an excellent writeup (as usual) of the November meeting.
With that, we draw a close to a great 2009 for NHRuby. Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday, 18 January 2010. See you in the new year!
November Meetup: EC2 and RVM
November 7th, 2009
NHRuby is meeting for the last time this year on Monday the 16th at 7pm at RMC Research, 1000 Market Street, Building 2, Portsmouth, NH. Monday?! You say? Yes — due to scheduling conflicts, the regular meeting day for NHRuby is now to the third Monday of the month. Also, since next month's meeting fell so close to the Christmas holiday, we decided to skip the December meetup and resume in January. So join us for the last meeting of 2009 for two presentations by NHRuby regulars, Nick Plante and Brian Turnbull.
Nick will present EC2, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 is a web service which allows customers to rent virtual server instances by the hour. The real power of EC2 is that it allows you to auto-scale your web applications on demand. Expecting heavy load today? Fire up another web app server or two, with no wait time for procurement, while taking advantage of Amazon's robust infrastructure.
Making EC2 even more attractive are tools like Matt Conway's Rubber, a set of extensions to Capistrano that allows you to script procurement and provisioning of server instances as well as deployment of your application itself. Need to set up a staging server? Use Rubber to deploy a disk image, install the necessary stack and utilities, and deploy the appropriate version of your application -- in moments -- all automatically. In this talk, Nick will quickly discuss the basics you need to know and then dive right into a realtime demo.
Brian will introduce RVM, the Ruby Version Manager. RVM is a command line tool which allows us to easily install, manage, and work with multiple Ruby environments and sets of gems. Topics to be covered include:
- Installation of RVM on Linux or OS X.
- Day to day use of RVM to switch between Ruby interpreters
- Managing sets of gems using Named Gem Sets
If you've ever been burned by differences between development and production, you should check out RVM — see how easy it is to take control of your Ruby environment.
So join us on Monday, 16 November at RMC Research for the last meeting of the year. Hope to see you there!
Software Process and Cucumber Recap
October 30th, 2009
Thanks again to Dan Pickett for coming out last week and sharing his talk about software process and outside-in development with us. And thanks to everyone else who came out, too. If you missed out, make sure to check out the slide deck embedded below:
And of course spend some time playing around with Cucumber, too. It’s good stuff.
As mentioned at the meetup, future NH.rb events will be switching to the third Monday of the month, due to schedule changes with RMC. We’ll be announcing the agenda for the November 16th meetup shortly, and will be skipping December since it falls so close to the holidays. ttys!
October Meetup: Software Process and Cucumber
October 15th, 2009
As mentioned on the email list, our October meeting will be held on the 22nd this month due to some scheduling conflicts. Join us at RMC Research at 7PM to hear our friend Dan Pickett of Enlight Solutions present his talk “From Wetware to Code – How’s Your Process?”
“We spend so much time focusing on conventional programming. Everyone focuses on standards, code clarity, testing, and what gems to use. Let’s chat about what’s done before your fingers hit the keys. Let’s talk about brainstorming, requirements, stakeholders, mock-ups, and writing solid user stories and acceptance tests with Cucumber. Every project has a story – how will your next one end?”
I can certainly say that Cucumber has changed the way that I approach software development, personally. This is sure to be a good talk, and something you don’t have to be a hardcore Ruby fanatic to get a lot out of either — the techniques and tools Dan will be talking about are useful to anyone doing software development on the web. Cucumber, for example, works great for Java, .NET, Flex or web applications written in any language. So tell your friends and coworkers, and we hope to see you on Thursday!
September Meetup: Ruby Games
September 9th, 2009
So Casey has been telling me how much fun our Portland-based comrades have been having with the RubyGames concept, so we’re gonna try that out this month in Portsmouth.
Wait. What? Games? Yup.
Ruby Games will test your programming and reasoning skills by presenting you with puzzle challenges to solve in code. I’ve already worked up one puzzle problem for the group (a word jumble problem), and Casey will be coming up with a second one. We’ll have people pair up to work on these, so don’t worry at all if you don’t have a lick of Ruby programming experience. In fact, I’d say that Ruby skills aren’t nearly as important as basic reasoning skills and inventiveness are.
Sounds good, right? But it gets better! By participating, you’ll learn (whether you like it or not) about:
- Basic Ruby syntax — an engaging but simple introduction to language basics and an opportunity to do hands-on learning with your peers.
- Test-Driven Development — you’ll be writing a solution, or an implementation, to a pre-defined spec we will supply. witness the power!
- Pair programming — we’ll be pairing people up, because two heads are better than one (right?)
- Algorithm runtime efficiency — once you’ve solved the problem, we’ll take a look at how fast your solutions run and compare approaches.
You’ll have fun. And you’ll learn something. It comes with a money-back guarantee. And free pizza, too. Mark your calendars for next Thursday September 17th at 7PM and join us at RMC Research in Portsmouth. I think it just might be the best NH.rb of the year.
August Meetup: The Rosa Restaurant
August 13th, 2009
We take a break from formal presentations this month to enjoy all the seacoast can offer. Please join us at The Rosa Restaurant (directions) starting at 7 PM on Thursday, August 20th for dinner, drinks and a Show ’N Tell.
Admission to the meeting is simple: a 2-minute to 10-minute standup presentation. (Okay, you can sit if you want.) The theme is Learning Ruby and Rails and Computing. Bring along a book or magazine and tell us why it makes you a great guru (or novice) Ruby programmer. Tell us about how you’re learning or keeping up. Talk about a web site you use. The best place to keep up on Rails news. An RSS aggregator you use to keep track of a lot of sites. A site that offers good podcasts. What’s your favorite reference site or book? The best tutorials? Talk about an add-on you’ve tried that’s sweet.
Eat, drink, be merry, teach something, learn something.
We’ve reserved a function room that should easily hold 15, so there’s no need to RSVP.
Hope to see you there!
Railscamp and Summer Break!
June 28th, 2009
Hey everybody! Just a quick note to let you know that we’ll be taking a break from the normal schedule in July, to give everyone a month off. Enjoy your summers and we’ll see you in August. In the meantime, if you’ve got a topic you’d like to talk about at the August meetup, definitely drop me a line.
I also wanted to remind everyone about Railscamp New England, which is happening relatively close by in the Bethel, Maine area, from July 17th – 20th. This is the very first North American Railscamp, and it’s being organized by our friends Pat Allan and Brian Cardarella (of Boston.rb). It’s going to be freeform and fun for both experienced Rubyists and beginners alike, is a great way to network with other kick-ass developers, and is an absolute bargain at only $120 for the entire weekend, including all food and lodging.
A couple of NH.rb folks have already signed up, but there are still some spots available. I hope we’ll see some of you there!
Sphinx and Sass Recap
June 27th, 2009
Thanks to everyone who came out to the meeting last Thursday. In particular, a big thanks to John for hosting us in Tim’s absence and to Pat for bussing it up from his temporary home in Boston to present for us.
We had two presentations this month. First, Pat presented a modified version of his Railsconf talk on Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx, which generated some healthy discussion and great post-meetup feedback.
Casey was the second speaker of evening. He asked the group some philosophical questions about the nature of stylesheets, introduced folks to Sass, and then debuted his Sassijs library, which allows Sass to be rendered directly from JavaScript in the browser. He showed off a cool demo of this, and discussed how it might be useful to get designers working directly with Sass, thus removing obstacles to creating clean easily refactorable stylesheets. Casey’s slide deck is available on GitHub.
After the meeting we all headed to the Brewery for late dinner and drinks. See you next time!
June Meetup: Sphinxy and Sassy
June 8th, 2009
We’re straying from the normal schedule again this month, but it’ll be worth it, I promise. We’ve got two great speakers lined up and lots to talk about. The meetup will be at the usual place on the fourth Thursday — June 25th @ 7PM.
The reason for the change? It’s two-fold; first, to accommodate special guest speaker Pat Allan, who is coming to us all the way from Australia (okay, he’s in Boston for the entire month, but that sure sounded good, right?) and also to avoid conflicting with the second Portsmouth tweetup event, which is being held on the 18th.
Pat will be presenting his popular Thinking Sphinx project, a Sphinx full-text search engine plugin for Rails. He’ll show us how to use them to add full-text database searching to your Rails applications.
Our other special guest for the evening is also traveling quite a distance to be with us — all the way from the frozen white tundra of Portland Maine. Yes, that’s right, our good friend Casey Rosenthal will finally be unveiling the awesome power of… SASSIJS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets + In + JavaScript)…
SASS was created to programatically build and organize CSS. Building on Ted Roche’s CSS presentation, Casey Rosenthal will review SASS syntax, and then open up the SASSIJS javascript library which renders *.sass templates client-side.
Leaving us a note in the blog comments or on the meetup group is strongly encouraged so we can plan to have refreshments enough for everyone. Hope to see you there!
Monit & Lightening Talks Recap
May 22nd, 2009
May’s NH.rb meeting featured a great introduction / refresher on Monit courtesy of Brian Turnbull. Thanks Brian!
Our second speaker unfortunately canceled at the last moment due to an emergency, but we filled the time with lightning talks by Tim Golden, Nick Quaranto, and myself. Tim talked about his experiences getting a Ruby development environment set up on Windows. Nick Q demoed his WIP Gemcutter project for us (a Rubyforge killer!) and talked a bit about how they were using Metric Fu at ThoughtBot. I talked about RDoc, YARD, and demonstrated the RDoc.info / docs.github.com projects that I’d been working on.
Afterwards, a bunch of us headed over to the Portsmouth Brewery for drinks. Thanks everybody for coming out and we hope to see you all next month!
May Meeting: Optimization & Monitoring
May 13th, 2009
Sorry about the delayed meeting announcement; I just returned from Railsconf and some southwest region exploration and had limited Internet access for awhile. But fear not! NH.rb is scheduled for the third Thursday of this month (May 21 7PM) at RMC as usual this month. The topics this month will be performance optimization (specifically for MySQL and Rails) and service monitoring.
First, David Berube will deliver his “High Performance Ruby on Rails and MySQL” talk, originally presented at MySQL Conference 2009 in April:
Database access in Ruby on Rails can be extremely slow, but it doesn’t have to be: this talk will discuss ways you can get massive performance speedups by increasing your query efficiency and by minimizing ActiveRecord object creation. This can keep your application scalable and responsible even under large datasets and modest hardware.
Brian Turnbull will then take us on a tour of Monit, and show us how to use it to manage production services. Monit is, of course, not just useful for Ruby tools but for all UN*X daemons and services, so make sure to spread the word to others you know who might be interested:
Monit is a flexible, open source utility for monitoring, reporting, and acting on processes, files, and servers to keep your deployed application healthy, secure, and running. This month, Brian Turnbull will share his real world experience installing, configuring, and running monit in production UN*X environments.
Thanks, we hope to see you all there!
State Machines & Git Recap
May 1st, 2009
We had 14 people at the NH.rb meetup last night. Thanks to all of you for coming out, and for the lively post-presentation discussions over at the Portsmouth Brewery.
The first speaker of the night was Russ Jones, who presented on the state machine pattern. Russ specifically covered the pluginaweek/state_machine Rails plugin in his talk, but the concepts were applicable across the board:
After Russ wrapped up, Nick Quaranto testified on the awesomeness of the Git distributed version control system, and showed us some practical development workflows using it:
Both presentations were great. Ted Roche has also written up his own summary and reactions, if you want to read more. Our host, Tim (of RMC Research) was kind enough to broadcast the meeting via WebEx, where a few additional peeps joined us, and I’m told it was recorded too. Check the comments on this article, where Tim will hopefully post a link to the recorded session.
Meeting times and topics for the May event will be announced shortly (it’ll be on the regular date, 5/21). Hit me up if you’ve got something you’d like to present about.
