Hey Folks, so far we’ve had a great line-up of speakers and topics. I appreciate everyone coming out and showing their support to the Group. I made a couple announcements at May’s meeting: There are no speakers scheduled for June or July.

RailsConf

This year’s RailsConf is scheduled 7-10 June. Our normally scheduled meeting is 8 June. If you’re going to RailsConf and would be interested in sharing your impressions then we might schedule a social sometime in June for RailsConf retrospective.

July

I’ll be having fun on family vacation on 13 July, our normally scheduled meeting date. Some ideas for the July meeting: 1) social, 2) lightning talks, 3) ruby hack night, 4) couple members present. Express your interest on the mailing list. My vote is for lightning talks, structured as 5 minute lightning talks.

August and the rest of the year

I’m busy trying to schedule interesting folks and looking for co-meeting opportunities. I’ll keep you guys posted.

Cheers, Mel

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 11 May
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Dominion

Meeting Note:

The location is where the RJUG usually meets. Plus, on the mailing list there is a thread started that should be used to submit your name, company, and email address to meet Dominion’s security requirements. I apologize for the inconvenience but Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.

Abstract:

HighTechCville is what happens when you have a month of paternity leave and are up at 3 AM, you’ve never seen a plugin or gem you couldn’t embed, and you want to learn more about crawling and indexing data, and that whole Semantic Web thing. We’ll go through some of the lessons I learned in the mean streets of scraping the Inter-tubes, from the pain of API throttles, the disappointment that Scrubyt was, to the ecstasy of HTTParty and OpenCalais.

Bio:

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we move from the read/write web to the read/write/share web.

In biotech, financial services and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software, with a focus on Solr. As a speaker he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

Announcements:

June

RailsConf is from 7 June to 10 June. Therefore there will be no regularly scheduled meeting, at least there’s no speaker scheduled for June. How many are attending RailsConf? Would there be interest in a social to discuss the conference?

July

There is no speaker scheduled for July. I will be scheduling a social; stay tuned for details.

Meeting Details

Date: Monday, 19 April
Time: 6:30 – 8:00 PM
Place: Tuckahoe Public Library

[Please let us know here or on the Google Group if you are planning on attending ASAP so we can find an appropriate space. Thanks! -matt]

Rails Can’t Scale!

Abstract:

Learn about what it takes to make popular applications like Basecamp, Campfire, Highrise, and Backpack run. If you’ve ever been curious about whether Rails can really scale or not, this is your chance to find out!

We’ll take a trip down memory lane with a discussion about what the current infrastructure for 37signals applications looks like today versus three years ago. We’ll go into detail about some of the decisions that were made along the way, both good and bad, and talk about what the future holds.

We’ll finish up with a whirlwind tour of some of Mark’s favorite tools and technologies. Things like HAproxy, Chef, MySQL, Erlang, and friends.

Hopefully we’ll leave plenty of time at thend for Q&A, since that’s the best part anyway.

Bio:

Mark is a System Administrator at 37signals where he works very hard to make it so that he gets woken up by broken things as seldom as possible.

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 9 March
Time: 6:30 – 8:00 PM
Place: Tuckahoe Public Library

Meeting Abstract

If you’ve ever wanted to collect money using Ruby, then you’ve probably run across ActiveMerchant. This fantastic piece of utility code from the Shopify team not only allows you to talk to a payment processor, it allows you to talk to a whole host of them using a single interface. I’ve gained a lot of experience with ActiveMerchant while working on Spreedly, and I’ll be imparting both how to most effectively use AM as well as how to extend it.

But of course, code is only a small piece of the whole “getting paid” picture. I’ll also talk about the difference between merchant accounts and payment gateways, why you might or might not want to use PayPal, and what you need to know about PCI in order to not have to know about PCI.

See you there!

Presenter Bio

Nathaniel runs Spreedly, Terralien, and the Raleigh Ruby Brigade. He also created test/unit a million years ago and occasionally sleeps polyphasically.

Sponsor

David Hamm of Signature Consultants will be providing the food for this month’s meeting.

Announcements

RubyNation 2010 http://rubynation.org/ There are now less than 40 tickets left. I encourage everyone to attend this regional conference.

RailsConf 2010 http://en.oreilly.com/rails2010 7-10 June; Registration is open; This year the conference will be in Baltimore, MD.

We’re going to reschedule next weeks meeting, we’ll update you all soon.

From Mel:

In light of our recent bouts of actual, real winter weather and the fact that our speaker will be coming from NC, I felt it best to postpone his presentation until further notice. I’m working with Clinton to see when he’s next available and will post details when I have them. Thanks for your understanding. Be safe, stay warm.

Time Change

Sorry for the late notice. However, the meeting is now from 6:30 until 8:30.

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 12 January
Time: 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Place: Tuckahoe Public Library

Meeting Abstract

Jim Van Fleet plans on comparing and contrasting three different groups, and talking about what kind of problems match the different kinds of technologies. Unlike MySQL and Postgres, for example, which although they have different feature sets, basically do the same thing at the end of the day, the technologies that are being lumped together under the NoSQL flag in many cases have nothing to do with each other:

• Document databases

These include Mongo and Couch. Ilya Grigorik includes Tokyo Cabinet in this category, and I’ll mention why I don’t (with an aside about Tokyo’s other benefits).

• Hash tables

There are like a zillion of these. Redis is quite popular, memcached was the first. Talking about benefits and genesis is pretty straightforward, but I’ll mention the points of contrast in the ones that I know about.

• The Modern Wonders of the World

Amazon’s Dynamo and Google’s BigTable are an inspiration to many implementers of NoSQL technologies. Even those implementers that aren’t directly working on related technologies know about them.

Dynamo is a lot like a distributed hash table with very particular rules and some backend wizardry.

BigTable is an entirely new way of modeling data and “doing an application”.

Cassandra, in particular, is a technology that uses elements of both, and is a major frontier. I can talk a little bit about what the benefits and costs are for investigating Cassandra today.

Presenter Bio

After catching the Ruby religion from Dave Thomas at a No Fluff Just Stuff in Reston in 2004, Jim Van Fleet has been working with Rails ever since. During his time as a Community Developer at TradeKing, he’s been involved in the dirty business of maintaining a quickly growing web application in Ruby that received a Webby nomination in 2008. He received his Doctorate of Sideburns from Hard Knocks University in 1994.

Announcements

CVREG Book Club will be kicking off this month. Pragmatic Programmer’s Security on Rails will be our first book.

Clinton Nixon of Viget Labs will be presenting next month: “The Joy of Ruby” His presentation does an excellent job of answering the question: Why use Ruby?

The Holidays are almost over and the CVReg book club is getting ready to kick off!

Leave a comment here, or contact @omnifroodle if you are planning on joining. Space will be limited for this first book.

The CVReg book club kicks off in January with Security on Rails by by Ben Poweski and David Raphael.

We will be meeting weekly somewhere in Richmond (suggestions?), and cover 1-2 chapters per meeting.

Make sure to comment here or send a tweet to #cvbeg or @omnifroodle to let us know you’ll be there.