New Hampshire Ruby Users Group - Home

July 2010 Meetup Recap

2010-07-22T14:49:00Z

Thank you to Nick Plante of Mogotest for a great talk on using Redis and Resque for asynchronous processing and caching. Slides from Nick's talk are up on Scribd and also embedded right here.

A Quick Introduction to Redis (NH.rb)

Join us next month on Monday, August 16th for two presentations. Brian Cardarella, recently returned to Boston from Washington DC, will talk about the client_side_validations gem he wrote while working for the Democratic National Committee. In addition, Brian Turnbull will share his experience interfacing Ruby with C.

July 2010 Meetup: Redis & Resque

2010-07-08T17:40:00Z

Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) Monday, 19 July 2010 at 7pm for the July edition of NHRuby. We meet and share projects and questions surrounding Ruby, Rails, and related technologies — all are welcome.

This month, we are thrilled to welcome Nick Plante back to the podium to talk about Redis and Resque! Nick is using both Redis and Resque in production to power portions of the backend of his UI test and verify service, Mogotest.

Redis is a fast key-value store, like Memcache but with more awesome. It features a (semi-)non-volatile data store and access to more sophisticated data structures like lists, sets, and ordered sets, all of which can be manipulated with a variety of powerful atomic operations. I'll talk about how we're using Redis in production at Mogotest, what it's good for, what it's not good for. I'll also describe how we're using Resque, a simple job queue system built on top of Redis, to handle a variety of asynchronous background tasks.

So join us Monday for an evening of code, conversation, and the company of your fellow Rubyists.

June 2010 Meetup Recap

2010-06-23T14:02:00Z

A big thanks to Nick Quaranto (rapper name: Q-Toronto) for joining us to share his experiences designing, building, and evolving Gemcutter (GitHub repo) as well as fostering community support for a better gem hosting service. Nick fielded questions, shared lessons learned, filled whiteboards, and ran a great open-ended presentation.

And a big thank-you to Ted Roche and Associates for picking up the pizza tab at this month's meeting. NomNomNom!

June 2010 Meetup: Gemcutter

2010-06-17T03:53:00Z

Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) this coming Monday, 21 June 2010 at 7pm for the June edition of NHRuby. We meet and share projects and questions surrounding Ruby, Rails, and related technologies — all are welcome.

This month, we are pleased to welcome Nick Quaranto back to New Hampshire! Nick was recognized this year with a Ruby Hero for his most excellent project, Gemcutter. This month, Nick is going to reprise for us his highly rated RailsConf talk, Lapidary: The Art of Gemcutting.

Gemcutter is now the central RubyGem host for the community, with over 10,000 gems and over 10 million gem downloads and counting. Learn why Gemcutter won the great RubyGem hosting battle of 2009 and about the challenges the site faces in 2010 and beyond. Discover how instant code deployment with Gemcutter is changing the way not only Rubyists develop and release software, but other open source communities as well.

So join us Monday for an evening of code, conversation, and the company of your fellow Rubyists.

May 2010 Meetup: Rails 3

2010-05-13T18:13:00Z

Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) this coming Monday, 17 May 2010 at 7pm for the May edition of NHRuby. We meet and share projects and questions surrounding Ruby, Rails, and related technologies — all are welcome.

This month, James Daniels will discuss Rails 3, reproducing the popular Rails screencast Creating a Weblog in 15 Minutes live to highlight changes and refinements coming in Rails 3. Check out the screencast [QuickTime] (it only takes 15 minutes!) and then join us Monday to see what's new in Rails 3.

April 2010 Meetup Recap

2010-04-21T00:26:00Z

We had great turnout this month for Sam Beam's presentation, No SQL, No Problem. Covering the history SQL, the NoSQL movement, and then diving deep into MongoDB and Ruby, Sam gave a great talk and moderated some lively discussion.

No SQL, No problem - using MongoDB in Ruby

View more presentations from sbeam.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday, 17 May 2010 — with tentative topics of Rails 3 and Unobtrusive JavaScript.

April 2010 Meetup: MongoDB

2010-04-14T18:13:00Z

Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) this coming Monday, 19 April 2010 at 7pm for the April edition of NHRuby. This month, Sam Beam of OnsetCorps will present:

Introducing Non-Relational Databases (NoSQL): MongoDB

An overview of the "NoSQL" movement, looking at the real-world advantages and disadvantages v/s traditional RDBMSs. Then, take a closer look at MongoDB, performing basic setup, inserts and queries from the command line. Then group-collaborate on building a Sinatra- based web application using MongoDB as the datastore, getting a feel for how the flexibility of a Non-R DBMS can shorten the development cycle.

March 2010 Meetup Recap

2010-03-17T00:16:00Z

Thank you to all that braved the floods and came out on a rainy Monday night for NHRuby. This month, our host at RMC, Tim Golden, lead a hands-on presentation covering setting up Ruby in a Windows environment.

Ruby on Windows - HOW TO install and set up

View more presentations from Tim Golden.

For the second half of the meeting, we fired up the Creating a Weblog in 15 Minutes with Rails 2 screencast and followed along on newly minted Ruby on Windows setups. Taking numerous breaks to discuss and learn the Rails techniques presented, we had Rails powered blogs coded in about 60 minutes!

Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday, 19 April 2010 with topics to be announced.

March 2010 Meetup

2010-03-10T01:08:00Z

Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) this coming Monday, 15 March 2010 at 7pm for the March edition of NHRuby. This month our host with the most, Tim Golden (Technology Director at RMC Research), is leading a hands-on session on setting up Ruby on Windows.

Windows has long been an "also ran" in the Ruby community... but no more! With a proper setup, Windows is a robust and stable platform for Ruby development and Tim will guide us through a live install of Ruby, Rubygems, and some popular gems. In addition, Windows IDEs (integrated development environments) will be covered. Wrapping up, we'll put our new Ruby environment to the test developing a simple Rails application.

Tim will be providing CDs of all packages needed to get up and running, so bring your Windows boxes and get setup with Ruby!

February 2010 Meeting Recap

2010-02-16T14:34:00Z

Thank you to all that came out for the first (by snow delay) meeting of NHRuby in 2010. We had good turnout for the meeting and a great time post-meeting closing the Portsmouth Brewing Company.

The the first half of the evening was a presentation by Brian Turnbull on Object Oriented Design in Ruby.

OOP Intro in Ruby for NHRuby Feb 2010

View more presentations from bturnbull.

For the second half of the meeting, we split into groups based on experience and prior exposure to Ruby. One group took on the programming exercise based on the presentation to create a class representation of a sliding tile puzzle. The second group rose to the challenge of writing a solver for sliding tile puzzles. And finally, Brian Turnbull lead a group through the Ruby idioms and conventions in the sliding tile puzzle implementation used by the challenger coders.

Thank you again for a great NHRuby meeting. Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday, 15 March 2010 with topics to be announced.

Railscamp New England

2010-02-16T00:33:00Z

Ted plugged the upcoming Railscamp NE event earlier tonight. So I thought I’d post some more information in case anyone is interested. I would strongly recommend attending if you’re able to. This was probably the single best tech event I attended last year. For serious.

Where: West Greenwich, RI (W. Alton Jones Campus)
When: March 12 – 15, 2010
Cost: $150
railscamps.com | sign up

Arrive Friday evening, leaving Monday morning (or anywhere in-between). The $150 price includes lunch and dinner for Saturday and Sunday. Those will allergies or special dietary needs can be accommodated.

Housing is provided on campus, there are small lodges with single beds. Spouses and significant others are encouraged to attend. We have some limited capacity for private rooms this time, so first come first serve on the private rooms. (couples only)

You must bring your own pillows and sheets
You must bring your own toiletries
You must bring your own towels

Intranet Wifi will be available throughout the camp, with no access to the outside internet. We hope to encourage people to seek out other developers and start a dialogue to get things done. No formal format as a regular conference, if you have material you wish to present you can do so, gather people and present and get feedback.

We should probably have an image of Gemcutter running locally, hopefully an image of Rdoc.info and Bannajour as well as the local Twitter client.

All skill levels are welcome and encouraged to attend. If you’re just learning it is a great opportunity to learn from others and make friends with many other great Ruby developers. If you’ve been hacking away for years it is a great chance to participate in what will basically be a 3 day hackfest.

Aside from just hacking there will be plenty of fun going on. Last year we had pretty epic RockBand-a-thons going on. On either Saturday or Sunday (we’ll probably pick the day with the best weather) there will be a 5k run on the campus property. (either a road race or on any of the many paths in the woods) Drinking, bon fires, s’mores, Werewolf, Urban Terror LAN-parties and more.

Local Events Calendar

2010-02-16T00:13:00Z

Living in the greater seacoast NH area and looking for other geeky events to attend? We are legion! Leslie Poston has put together a calendar of local NH tweetups, meetups, seminars and events you might be interested in. Check it out and see what else NH has to offer (ical link).

February 2010 Meetup

2010-02-06T03:14:00Z

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

2010-01-18T16:34:00Z

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

2010-01-11T16:37:00Z

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!