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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
Sinatra & CSS Fundamentals Recap
March 20th, 2009
Thanks to everyone for coming out last night for the March meetup. It was great to see the usual suspects. And a few new faces, too!
As usual we had two topics to discuss. First, Ted Roche presented a review of CSS fundamentals, including an overview of the box model and element positioning—certainly something handy for those of us at all skill levels. You can find Ted’s slides at his website.
Afterwards, I took the stand to present the second topic of the night, speeding through a quick introduction to the Sinatra Ruby framework. We followed that up by live coding a simple user group prize chooser (source at GitHub).
A Quick Introduction to Sinatra (NH Ruby)
O’Reilly provided us with two books as meeting giveaways, which were rewarded using the livecoded Sinatra app :-). Thanks also to Tom Lee Jr and Andrew of Exeter-based DualStreet / Great Northern Products (a provider of Rails-based industrial e-commerce solutions) for providing refreshments. And of course to our host, Tim Golden and RMC Research, for providing the space and Webex goodness.
See you next month!
Ruby Gems, Jeweler, and a Rails 2.3 Preview
February 20th, 2009
Last night’s meeting was a lot of fun for me. I hope it was for the rest of you too (and everyone else who joined us online via WebEx!) It’s always nice to see all the familiar faces, and some new ones too this time around.
First, guest speaker Josh Nichols presented his work on Jeweler and an overview of publishing Ruby Gems:
After a short break, Brian Turnbull reviewed the new features available in Rails 2.3 (currently a release candidate, general availability soon), including a detailed look at Rails Metal and Rack.
If you enjoyed the presentations, I invite you to recommend Josh and Brian on WorkingWithRails. Thanks to everyone for coming out and hope you had a safe drive home! Who knew we were going to have a snowstorm, right?
ReviewRamp, Cucumber, and DynamicRecord
January 16th, 2009
The first NH.rb of the new year was a good one. Jonathan Linowes descended from his mountain retreat to deliver a trio of topics. Fourteen people attended in total, and a number of us headed over to the Portsmouth Brewery for drinks afterwards. Thanks to Jon for making the trek and to everyone else for the great conversation.
