Orange County Ruby Users Group

We had a great turn out at Oakley last night. Thanks to Randall for letting us use their space and the tour as well as the pizza and drinks that were provided. And thanks to Robert for an engaging presentation on Git. I didn’t get an exact head count but I believe we had about 15 or more in attendance.

We will be having our next OC Ruby meeting Thursday, April 24th, at the Oakley Headquarters in Foothill Ranch. We will meet at 6:30pm (instead of the usual 7pm). Topics will be on:

1. Introduction to and advanced strategies for ActiveRecord for mapping your database to Ruby model objects

2. The Git version control system, created by Linus Torvalds and used by the Rails, Merb, and RSpec teams. For a talk given by Linus at Google on Git see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
If you’ve never visited Oakley’s offices before it’s almost reason alone to come visit. Our guest Randall can give a brief tour of the facility as well.

Here’s a Google map to Oakley
http://tinyurl.com/5789ob

Here’s Oakley’s address and driving directions page
http://oakley.com/customer_service/directions

See the event on Upcoming.org and please RSVP so we can get an estimated head count
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/474008/?ps=5

Our friends at O’Reilly has recently sent me 2 books to give out as review copies. They are

• Rails for PHP Developers from the Pragmatic Programmer Series
• The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan & Yukihiro Matsumoto (”Matz”) from O’Reilly

If anybody would like to read any one of these books then write a book review on Amazon.com or Slashdot book reviews or anywhere else on the web let me know and send a link to the review. This way O’Reilly will keep sending us books if they know our user group members will read them and submit reviews online.

On Feb 28th we had a small but engaged group. There were about 5 developers, Gary (our host) and 2 recruiters from TEKsystems looking for developers. We gave the ladies a few minutes of the floor to pitch about what they’re looking for. After downing some pizza and drinks we dove into the RESTful Rails screencast from Peepcode. We only got about half way through so we’ll be continuing next time where we left off. Peepcode didn’t have the Rails 2.0 version of the screencast ready yet so we’ll have to refactor some of what we’ve learned over to 2.0 which would be a good way to end the topic once we finish going through the video.

The OC Ruby Users Group will be meeting this Thursday, Feb 28th, for it’s monthly meeting. We will be watching the 1 hour and 24 minutes long Peepcode screencast on “RESTful Rails” and discussing it as well.

Pizza and drinks will be served, provided by Caneum and Ubero but we would ask everybody pitch in a few dollars of donation to help defray costs.

We will be meeting at Caneum in Newport Beach, the same place we met last month.

This event is posted on Upcoming.org. It would be great if you could RSVP there so we can get an estimated headcount.

Last week’s meeting went off nicely. We had 8 developers in attendance, some off-shore developers in India dialed in via a conference call, and last but not least Gary, our host from Caneum. After chatting a bit and taking in some pizza as well as raiding Caneum’s refrigerator of sodas, beer and wine (thanks again Gary!) we jumped into DHH’s blog post about the Rails 2.0 release and just went through the changes that were made and went through them to understand their implications more clearly.

Sorry, I forgot my camera so no pics this time. The view of Newport Harbor was pretty nice though. And the small and tight-cornered parking garage would make a sweet laser tag arena!

RailConf registration is now open. Don’t forget the O’Reilly discount code “rc08usrg” for a 15% discount. Let us know if you plan on going.

RailsConf 2008 Registration

On Weds January 30th (not our usual 4th Thursday) we will meet to discuss Rails 2.0 at 7pm at Caneum’s office in Newport Beach. Caneum’s facility seats about 15, up to 20 if some don’t mind standing. Caneum has also been kind enough to offer pizza and drinks as well for us.

Also, Caneum is looking to hire some Rails developers for a project they have so if anybody’s interested bring your resumes.

Here’s Caneum’s contact info, take the elevator to the 4th floor

http://www.caneum.com/contact-us.aspx

Their office is directly across the street from Sterling BMW.

Here’s a map

http://tinyurl.com/379van

We will discuss what’s new with Rails 2.0.

One of our own members, Michael Hartl, just published a book RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails. Check it out and good luck with the book!

Last night 4 of us (Daiyu, Doug, Steve and I (Scott)) met at Panera. After a few minutes of initial chit chat and food ordering we discussed our backgrounds with Ruby and our interests. Doug was under the impression that perhaps we weren’t a group interested in Rails and we’re just Ruby purists. We rapidly clarified that what brought most of us to Ruby was indeed Rails and we hope our mastery of Ruby would result in building more powerful Rails apps. This triggered the need to publicize ourselves as Ruby & Rails developers to the community.

We then went over OOP constructs, in general, and then how it’s implemented in Ruby. For the last hour we spend most of our time, at Steve’s suggestion, going over some of the Ruby Quiz. We picked the last one #121 and thought about how we might implement it. We quickly realized that at least for this time we would start at #1 and also go over the suggested results and figure out how it worked and why. We were quickly engrossed in multiple irb sessions picking apart the solution and learning some new tricks on the way. All came out of it smarter Rubyists.

We then thought it might be a good idea for future meetings to continue to go through the Ruby Quizzes as a group instead of just going through the book a-la reading group. It’s more interactive and engrossing and interesting to see other people’s solutions. It would be good to encourage others to develop their own solutions to the Ruby Quizzes before coming and to take upon yourself the challenge of solving the problems on your own before resorting to looking at other’s solutions.

Ruby Quiz can be found at http://www.rubyquiz.com/.