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.

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?

As 2009 comes to a close, we have one of our own stepping up the plate to talk to us about URI’s and their lifecycle.

Abstract

“Rack::Route301, A rack module to manage old routes”

Moving an existing site from the old and busted to the new hotness involves a million little details. Removing that old table layout, scrubbing the data, selling or sneaking in a new feature or two, etc., etc., all the way down to the zoot. But when all is said and done, where did mysupersite.net/lolfrogz?color=blu&cuteness=-4 go?

URI lifetime matters.

We’ll talk about a few solutions, from .htaccess, to application controllers in RoR, to Rack. And finish with Rack::Route301, an very young Rack based solution that Matt will be releasing as an open source project.

Location

Tuckahoe Public Library, 1901 Starling Drive in Richmond.

Look here for directions: http://www.henricolibrary.org/Libs/tu.html

Too Much Going On In Your Family?

We all know that Agile helps projects and companies plan and execute work better. And, as Agilists, we have seen how this results in happier relationships at work.

So, why not at home too?

In partnership with the Central Virginia Ruby Enthusiasts Group (CVREG) (www.cvreg.org) Agile Richmond is happy to present a session with Joe and Peace Meade on “Scrum for Kids”. Come find out how you can successfully apply the principals of scrum with your family to get more done, more reliably, and with happier results.

Tuesday, November 10th at 6pm

Location: Tuckahoe Public Library, 1901 Starling Drive in Richmond. Look here for directions: http://www.henricolibrary.org/Libs/tu.html

Be sure to spread the word and invite all you know. This meeting is not to be missed.

In conjunction with the RJUG, Andy Hunt [1], of Pragmatic Programmer fame, will be in Richmond to talk about: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor your Wetware [2].

This session is not exclusively about programming but about how we learn and how best to learn. Therefore, I would encourage you to invite everyone you know.

Please register at the link below so we can have an accurate head count for food and seating.

http://www.richmondjug.com/event/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning-andy-hunt-pragmatic-programmer

If you’re able to I would encourage you to volunteer your time for this event; RJUG is looking for some help with the logistics of this meeting.

Links

[1] Website

[2] Book

[3] The Pragmatic Bookshelf

[4] Andy Hunt on Twitter

[5] RJUG

[6] CVREG on Twitter

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 8 September
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: INM United

Location Change

This meeting is being held in a new location. Parking is a little awkward so visit this image to find out where to park. You’ll want to park behind the INM building in order to get free validation. INM will provide it.

Parking Location

Meeting Abstract

The “midori” generative framework, php flavor. The framework goals are a clean api, generate redundant code, and focus on data centric problems (validation, abstraction, business objects, etc), some form of an application plugin/module system, and of course the hardest part, good documentation. The php flavor includes Boxing Types for values in php so that you can easily chain methods and maintain formatting of dates, etc.

http://github.com/michaelherndon/midori-php/tree/master

Presenter Bio

Youssef Chaker is a software developer at OpenSource Connections, where he’s been helping the OSC team take over the world one web app at a time. Youssef graduated from UVa with a Bachelors in Science in Computer Engineering in 2008 and had his first but brief introduction to Ruby writing an interpreter for a language called COOL (classroom object oriented language, developed in Berkeley). He’s also been using Ruby on Rails since joining OSC and has fallen back in love with programming since. He is also the author of the ZeepIt plugin, an easy way to integrate the Zeep Mobile API into a Rails application.

Michael Herndon is a senior developer at OpenSource Connections, specializing in bleeding edge technology, standards, development tools and software on both the web and desktop platforms. Not much else is known about him, the rest of his bio is evidently sealed in a vault, protected by killer Buddhist monks. If you don’t wish to go up against killer Buddhist monks, you could try his website: www.amptools.net

Sinatra (http://sinatrarb.com) creator, Blake Mizerany (@bmizerany), will be joining us for a special CVREG event on Tuesday August 18th, 2009.

Blake currently works on/for Heroku (http://heroku.com). Heroku is nothing less than a bad ass deployment architecture allowing you to deploy fast and scale fast. Blake is currently doing a tour around the country meeting with local groups to talk about Heroku and show off the awesome stuff it can do.

Join us and make him welcome. If you have any questions about Heroku or Sinatra come out and ask him. He loves nothing more than to talk about both of them.

Please pass this along to any other meetup lists that you follow to get the word out.

Details

Date: 6:00 pm Tuesday August 18th, 2009

INM United Office 101 S. 15th Street St., Suite 102 Richmond, Va 23219

Map – http://bit.ly/8z345

Parking is a little awkward so visit this image to find out where to park. You’ll want to park behind the INM building in order to get free validation. INM will provide it.

http://img.skitch.com/20090812-qdcaatyu6s7q25sndgpb8qq2pd.jpg

Thanks and see you there!

-jon

It’s June Already?

I can’t believe this year is already half over. We’ve been fortunate enough to have speakers since last October; the rest of the year is pretty exciting too. And so without further ado, here’s the current line-up from July to December 2009:

Schedule

Notes

If any of the meetings/speakers change I will send out a notice. Plus, the October meeting will be a joint meeting with the RJUG. As the dates get closer I’ll send out additional details on each speaker and their topic.

See you at the Meetings! Remember, spread the word and bring a friend!