Posted by Gray Herter
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:02:00 GMT
Agenda:
Jeff Casimir will present "Dynamic Generation of Images and Video with Ruby-Processing" at the March meeting of the Northern VA Ruby Users Group.
Note: This meeting will feature Jeff's presentation, but will also now include a half-hour overview of the Rails 3 Beta (what's new and what to expect) provided by Chris Flipse.
When at Where: Mar 3rd from 6:30 PM - 9 PM at FGM, 12021 Sunset Hills Rd, Suite 400, Reston, VA 20175
Pizza and sodas at 6:30. Presentations start at 7 PM
Description:
Ruby-Processing is an awesome library which wraps Processing with a JRuby interpreter and a simple Ruby syntax. Using ruby-processing your Rails app can programmatically create complex images using static images, 2D shapes, 3D with OpenGL, animation and video.
We can leverage the power of Processing and existing Java libraries from the comfort of Ruby.
In this session we’ll take a quick look at ruby-processing to understand how it works, then add dynamic image creation to a sample Rails app. We’ll discuss the potential of leveraging Processing from Rails and layout directions for further research.
Speaker:
Jeff Casimir runs the respected Jumpstart Labs, where he will be glad to teach you Ruby, Rails, Flex, SQL, etc!
Posted by Gray Herter
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:35:00 GMT
Agenda:
Ammar Yousuf will present a behind the scenes look at Shoutreel, a micro-forum site and Jeff Kunkle will present Grant, a Rails security plug-in at the February meeting of the Northern VA Ruby Users Group.
When at Where: Feb 3rd from 6:30 PM - 9 PM at FGM, 12021 Sunset Hills Rd, Suite 400, Reston, VA 20175
Pizza and sodas at 6:30. Presentations start at 7 PM
Description:
Yousuf will present an overview of the design and features of Shoutreel, a micro-forum Rails site. This talk will include a discussion of the technical aspects of Shoutreel, including design choices and solutions.
Jeff Kunkle will present Grant, a Ruby on Rails plugin for securing access to your ActiveRecord model objects by declaratively specifying rules permitting CRUD operations on your models. This short talk will discuss the reasons for creating Grant and provide some short code examples demonstrating how to use it.
Speakers:
Ammar Yousuf is the principal designer and developer of Shoutreel.
Jeff Kunkle is the Chief Technology Officer for Near Infinity and is the author of the Grant plug-in for Rails.
Description:
A new presentation consisting of content from Aman's threading talk, which he has presented at various Ruby conferences, and add some newer stuff about ruby-level debugging.
Speaker:
Aman Gupta is a serial entrepreneur, ruby hacker and a recent winner of a Ruby Heroes award. He currently maintains the EventMachine project and various other gems that help build high-performance distributed and asynchronous systems in ruby, including em-mysql, em-spec, jsSocket and amqp.
Most recently, Aman has been hacking on performance improvements to MRI, releasing several patches to ruby and perftools.rb, a sampling profiler for ruby code based on google-perftools.
First Presentation: ActiveScaffold by David Medinets
ActiveScaffold is a tool that produces on-the-fly scaffolding that looks much better than the default Rails scaffolding. It uses Ajax to create, update, and delete without page reloads. Also, the scaffold is nearly totally customizable in well-documented ways. In this presentation, David will show how to use ActiveScaffold to produce a custom user interface while still letting the tool do the hard work of generating forms.
BIO: David Medinets has been programming since 1980, starting with a TRS-80 Model 1. He still fondly remembers the days when he could cross-wire the keyboard to create funny-looking characters on the display. Since those days, he has written three books teaching the Perl, PHP, and BASH languages. David is a SCRUM Master and expert application developer specializing in Ruby and Java. He is knowledgeable about the business domains of Insurance, Supply Chain, and Airline Inventory.
Second Presentation: Stop Talking, Start Teaching: 5 Rules for Successful Communication by Jeff Casimir
Some of the most important work we do as programmers involves pitching ideas. Whether it’s inside the team, searching for funders, or running demos for potential clients, we all need to present ideas and cultivate an audience.
The past decade has seen the rise of the presentation as an important communication medium, but few people do it well. There are many resources on how to make good-looking slides, but we need to focus on the method, structure, and content.
We don’t need to be “speakers” – we need to be teachers. In this session we’ll explore the five most essential rules to successful teaching and how they apply to you.
Attendees will, by the end of the session, have a framework for designing and critiquing their work and that of others. This new understanding will make them better teammates and more successful
salespeople.
BIO: After majoring in Computer Systems Engineering Jeff joined Teach for America and began a career in education. He taught high school Computer Science for four years before moving into school
administration. As a Vice Principal he was responsible for evaluating and hiring new teachers, observing and coaching existing teachers, and defining much of the school’s academic process. As part of that process, he built a “School Information System” (SIS) in Ruby that ran every aspect of the school.
Most of all, Jeff hates boring presentations. He wants everyone to Stop Talking, and Start Teaching.
Abstract:
We have had several requests for some beginner topics lately, so I figured it was time for another Newbie event. This time we will concentrate on Rails persistence. We have three talks arranged. Additional short Rails persistence-related topics are welcomed if you want to propose one. It doesn't have to be strictly about the ActiveRecord.
First, Gray Herter will demonstrate creating a small, but complete and (relatively) realistic database-backed domain model using ActiveRecord.
Second, for an intermediate topic, Arild Shirazi will present an ActiveRecord replacement framework he recently created to wrap a legacy Java-based persistence component. It includes most of the expected ActiveRecord methods providing saves, finds, and validations.
And third, David Keener will present "Rails Tips and Best Practices," a compendium of Rails beginner tips, covering some query optimizations, some migration tactics, a few typical gotchas to watch out for, etc.
Any short topic that you think might pique the interest of someone curious about Rails persistence is fair game.
And don't forget to bring your Rails Newbie friends.
Bios:
Gray Herter is a Project Manager leading a JRuby on Rails project for the US State Dept supporting international export control. Gray has worked with Rails since 2007, and also produces the RubyNation conference. Arild Shirazi is a software engineer at CodeSherpas with a background in Java EE and Rails, and former protein biochemist. David Keener speaks frequently at the NovaRUG. He is currently working on a Rails project for the US State Dept supporting video-based contests.
Where:
FGM, Inc
12021 Sunset Hills Rd, Suite 400
Reston, VA 20175
Call 703 727-1307 to get in (the outside door is locked after 6 PM).
Note: Prior to the main talk, Charles Calvert will give a brief overview of the Independent Computer Consultants Association and its usefulness as a resource for both
consultants and those hiring consultants.
Description: We all experienced how easy it is to get started with
Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx but it becomes complex very quickly with
sophisticated data models.
We will talk about the folowing topics:
Indexing through has_many relationships using multi-value
attributes and the limitations of that solution.
Search filters
Geolocation search
Cross index search
Cross model search
The goal of this presentation and discussion is to give and
illustrate
simple code solutions to solve common search problems using
Sphinx and
Thinking Sphinx.
Speaker: Christophe Lucas is currently the lead software engineer at
VisualCV,
Inc. Prior to VisualCV, he worked at Revolution Health
Group, LLC,
designing and developing web applications using the Ruby on
Rails
framework. He also developed desktop applications using
Java at the
National Institute of Standards and Technology as a guest
researcher
and at Meta Integration Technology. He is a firm believer
in the
Manifesto for Agile Software Development and eXtreme
Programming best
practices.
Location:
FGM HQ,
12021 Sunset Hills Rd, Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Call 703 727-1307 (Gray) to get in.
Description: "Workflow" is a generic concept that can mean different things to
different people – a book author is going to think of workflow a lot differently
than a photographer processing images. Whether you are implementing a simple
shopping cart or building a complex system to track the review of legal
documents, there are abstract concepts of states, transitions, actions, actors,
assignments, tasking, concurrency, sequences, and dependencies we can use.
Come learn about tools and techniques for implementing workflow concepts in Ruby
and Rails. From user stories with `shoulda', through state machines, to complete
workflow engines like OpenWFEru, this is a rich space with a lot to learn.
Speaker: David Bock is a founder and principal at CodeSherpas, a software
engineering consultancy in the Northern Virginia area. Prior to falling in love
with Ruby, Mr. Bock spent many years writing custom workflow solutions in Java
for the U.S. State Department. His work in this space protects the borders of
many countries from hazardous imports and exports, and was instrumental in
Poland meeting some reporting obligations for entry into NATO.
Sponsor:
Location:
FGM HQ,
12021 Sunset Hills Rd, Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Call 703 727-1307 (Gray) to get in.
Posted by Gray Herter
Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:09:00 GMT
The next meeting of the NovaRUG will be held Wednesday, Apr 15th at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. The presentation will start at 7 PM.
Register:Register Here to RSVP. Please make sure to register since this should generate a lot of interest. I will make sure the HVAC is left on this year!
Topic: We don't know, but with Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas presenting it will be worth your while to attend. I heard that they plan to examine some code in detail.
Speakers: Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, the famous authors of the Pickaxe Ruby book that we all have on our desk. They are also teaching an upcoming Rails class in Reston, April 15-17.
Sponsors: Food and drink will be provided starting at 6:30, pizza courtesy of CodeSherpas.
Sodas (and the room) from FGM, as usual.
Cookies and brownies from RubyNation (hey, we don't have to buy pizza this time!).
Jetbrains: We will also give out a Jetbrains license, good for ReSharper Personal License, dotTrace Personal
License, IntelliJ IDEA Personal License, TeamCity Build Agent (their
Continuous Integration and Build Server), or RubyMine (new Ruby IDE).
Location: FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building.
Posted by Gray Herter
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 01:04:00 GMT
The next meeting of the NovaRUG will be held Tuesday, Mar 31st at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentation will start at 7 PM.
Register Here (just take the poll so we know how much pizza to buy):
Topic: Bryan will review his toolbox for acceptance testing Ruby web applications. This presentation
will be a demonstration of how to get the most out of your acceptance tests. Bryan will talk about Cucumber, Webrat, Webrat with Cucumber, Integrity, his environment and then share a list of other resources.
We have some T-shirts to give out (Radrails/RubyNation), and some Radrails books, too.
Speaker: "Only write code to make your tests pass." A simple statement for many, but a way of life for Bryan Liles. Writing tests and blogging, speaking, and demonstrating everything associated is a passion that Bryan expends way too much time evangelizing. Bryan started his professional life as a Unix admin and has slowly realized that writing code was his passion, so now he spends all his time hacking on the latest and greatest technologies.
Location: FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building.
Posted by Gray Herter
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:07:00 GMT
The meeting will be held Wednesday, Nov 19th at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentation will start at 7 PM.
Topic:Ramaze (http://ramaze.net) is a simple, light and modular open-source web application framework written in Ruby.
Even though Ramaze hasn't been in the spotlight as
much as Merb and Sinatra, it has a lot to offer:
Like Merb, it lets you select from a variety of ORMs and templating engines
Ramaze is developed in a BDD fashion with specs written in Bacon.
The documentation and examples from the site are very good and the code is easy to dig into.
The community is very friendly and helpful
This talk is an introduction to Ramaze and show why you should consider
it for your next project.
We have some T-shirts to give out (Ramaze and Radrails), and some Radrails books, too.
Speaker: Luc Castera is a curious software engineer, always trying to learn new
technologies and improve his
skills. He is currently the lead-developer behind ShareMeme.com and
has held positions at Verizon,
GE, and Delphi Electronics. He has used many different languages and
platforms such as Java, Tcl/Tk,
C, Ruby, and C#/.NET throughout his career. He discovered Ruby two
years ago and has been a big fan
ever since.
Luc received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of
Virginia before attending
Georgia Tech to obtain his Masters degree in the same field. Born and
raised in Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, he now lives in the DC Metropolitan area.
Location: FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building
