NovaRUG

April 9-10 - RubyNation Conference

Gray Herter — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:28:00 -0600

Register now for the RubyNation conference, the Nation Capital area's Ruby and Rails community conference. This year's RubyNation features many excellent speakers including Dave Thomas, Gregg Pollack, Jim Weirich, Joe O'Brien, Jeremy McAnally, Glenn Vanderburg, Nick Sieger, Neal Ford and lots of others.

When at Where: Apr 9-10 6 AM - 6 PM both days, at the Sheraton in Reston, Virginia.

To register or learn more click on the image below:

Note: Since this event is produced in conjunction with the NovaRUG, there will be no regular NovaRUG meeting in April.

Mar 3: Dynamic Generation of Images and Video with Ruby-Processing (plus Rails 3 Beta Overview)

Gray Herter — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:02:00 -0600

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

Sponsored by:

To register for the NovaRUG Meeting: Click Here!

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!

Feb 3: Shoutreel Mirco-Forums and the Grant Plug-In

Gray Herter — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:35:00 -0600

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

Sponsored by:

Register: Click Here!

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.

Dec 2: Debugging Ruby: Understanding and Troubleshooting the VM and Your Application by Aman Gupta

Gray Herter — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:37:00 -0600

Main Topic: Debugging Ruby: Understanding and Troubleshooting the VM and Your Application by Aman Gupta

When at Where: Dec 2nd 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

Sponsored by:

Register: Click Here!

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.

Nov 4: ActiveScaffold and Stop Talking, Start Teaching: 5 Rules for Successful Communication

Gray Herter — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:56:00 -0500

Two Topics: ActiveScaffold by David Medinets and Stop Talking, Start Teaching: 5 Rules for Successful Communication by Jeff Casimir

When at Where: Nov 4th 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

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.

Oct 13: Programming Scala by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam

Gray Herter — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:14:00 -0500

Oct 13: Programming Scala by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam

When at Where: Oct 13th from 6 PM - 9 PM at FGM, 12021 Sunset Hills Rd, Suite 400, Reston, VA 20175

Scala is a nice language to program on the JVM. It's concise, scalable, powerful, expressive, and integrates well with Java. Your day-to-day tasks like processing XML, matching patterns of various expressions, working with collections and String, are all made simpler, concise, and elegant by the Scala language syntax and build-in libraries. In this presentation you will immerse into the Scala goodness, and learn how you can make use of it in your Java applications.

We will also raffle off a pass to the 2009 Northern Virginia Software Symposium returning November 6-8, 2009. Check out the conference by clicking the following image link:

BIO: Dr. Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc. has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He helps his clients succeed with Agile Development and various software technologies. He is a veteran speaker at the NFJS conference series (www.nofluffjuststuff.com) and a frequent invited speaker at various other international software conferences. He authored ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), and co-authored the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book "Practices of an Agile Developer," and authored "Programming Groovy" and "Programming Scala" (all from Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Aug 27: Rails 101: Persistence Night

Gray Herter — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:09:00 -0500

Title: Rails 101: Persistence Night

When: Aug 27, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Register: Click here to register.

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).

July 15: Search using Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx, lessons learned by Christophe Lucas

Gray Herter — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:37:00 -0500

Title: Search using Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx, Lessons Learned

Food: Pizza and sodas will be provided.

Time: Weds July 15, 6:30 PM - 9 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.

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.

May 14: Modeling Workflow in Ruby on Rails by David Bock

Gray Herter — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:08:00 -0500

Title: Modeling Workflow in Ruby on Rails

Food: Pizza and sodas will be provided.

Time: 6:30 PM - 9 PM.

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.

Apr 15: Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler show some code

Gray Herter — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:09:00 -0500

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.