Orange County Ruby Users Group

Here is a list of potential topics that we would want presented. If you’re interested in learning any of these by forcing yourself to present it then let Scott know. Or, if you’re experienced in any of these topics and could present any of these also let us know. Remember, you don’t have to be an expert to present, researching the topic in order to speak about it is a great way to force yourself to learn these topics. Nobody will expect you have eons of experience working in these subjects. I like to think of it as more of a graduate school environment where students do research and present to their peers.

Intro Topics

• Cool things with Ruby strings, arrays, hashes, and other interesting data types and their behaviors
• Once and for all: Ruby closures, iterators and symbols explained
• How ActiveRecord works and how to use it with “unconventional” databases structures
• Overview of a set of cool and commonly-used Rails plugins that are out there
• Overview of a set of cool and commonly-use Ruby Gems that are out there
• Ajax and Rails
• MVC explained, tips and strategies for implementing this design pattern effectively
• Overview of RailsConf 2006 (Michael’s got this one for July)

Advanced Topics

• Advanced Ruby performance tips, gotchas to look out for
• The Ruby Quiz, perhaps a topic of a side study group or the weekly meetings, work on it together and figure out why your answer was wrong
• Overview and demo of your favorite “Rails Recipes”
• Tips for Rails debugging
• Rails scaling, performance and deployment considerations
• Overview and demo of new Rails 1.1 and/or upcoming 1.2 features
• Agile Design of Rails Applications, from Requirements to Rails
• More metaprogramming
• Domain Specific Languages in Ruby
• JRuby, Ruby.NET, and other Ruby mutations

Presentation History