Please note that this is a non-standard meeting location.

Meeting Details

• Date: Tuesday, November 8, 2011
• Time: 6:00 PM
• Location: Dominion Digital, 4101 Cox Rd, Glen Allen (Google Maps link)

Abstract

Despite our use of frameworks like Ruby on Rails being famous for conventional code, we still find ourselves with complicated and difficult to understand applications. Worse yet, our automated tests often end up just as complicated and slow. We have helpful design patterns to follow, so why does our code become more difficult to understand as our application grows? The cure for our pain is following DCI conventions to separate what our program *is* from what it does and to let our user’s mental model of our programs shine through.

Bio

Jim Gay is the Lead Developer for RadiantCMS and is a prolific contributor to it and many open-source projects. At Saturn Flyer LLC he’s built numerous Radiant sites, custom applications, and award winning graphic design. Jim has been a co-host of the Ruby 5 podcast, speaker at RubyNation, Rocky Mountain Ruby, and ArrrrCamp, is the founder of Arlington Ruby, and has been professionally building Ruby and Rails applications since 2006.

You can find Jim on twitter: @saturnflyer

Please note that this is a non-standard meeting location.

Meeting Details

• Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2011
• Time: 6:00 PM
• Location: Dominion Digital, 4101 Cox Rd, Glen Allen (Google Maps link)

Abstract

The Ruby community is obsessed with testing, supposedly. In my experience about four out of five applications have either zero or completely ineffective test coverage.

Have the courage to change it. Whether your own projects or recovering someone else’s mess, let’s talk strategy:

• Starting with metrics
• Refactoring for understanding
• Comment-driven development
• The unit testing foundation
• Bug reports are your best integration tests
• Focusing on value
• Rescue projects are popping up everywhere, and a strategic testing approach can save the day.

Bio

Jeff started Jumpstart Lab in 2009. He travels the world preaching the good word of Ruby. Lately he’s been pushing an agenda of professional design practices with emphasis on object oriented architectures backed by solid testing. Plus he tell jokes.

You can find Jeff on twitter: @j3 or @jumpstartlab

Instead of our normal meeting in September, we're going to hold a Hack Night.

All levels welcomed

New to Ruby? That's OK! We'll have plenty of people there that can answer your questions. Very Comfortable with Ruby? Super! Come share your knowledge of the language with those just starting out. In-Between? Perfect! Come on out and have some fun.

Need some help

Having trouble getting started with Ruby? We can help.

Stuck on a bug? We can help.

Curious about Ruby, Rails? We can help.

Curious about Cucumber, RSpec, Test::Unit, etc.? We can help.

Curious about TDD, BDD? We can help.

Just wanna "talk shop" and enjoy a beer or two! We can help!

Spread the word

See you there and be sure to tell your friends.

Meeting Details

• Date: Tuesday, September 13, 2011
• Time: 6:00 PM
• Location: Legend Brewing Company (map)

Next Month

Jeff Casimir, from Jumpstart Lab, will be presenting:

There Are No Tests

The Ruby community is obsessed with testing, supposedly. In my experience about four out of five applications have either zero or completely ineffective test coverage...

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 14 September
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Capital Ale House

Party Time!

Hey folks, after a hot, hot, hot Virginia summer, I think it’s social time. So, for September’s meeting we’ll be gathering at the Capital Ale House in Innsbrook for cold beverages, mostly ok food, and interesting conversations about what we did over the summer and all the cool technology we’re messing with.

Be sure to bring a friend and spread the word.

See you there!

Announcements:

• October Meeting (12 Oct): Matthew Bass and A/B Testing
• JRuby Conf 2010 (1-3 Oct): http://jrubyconf.org Follow on Twitter: @jrubyconf There’s a User Group Discount Available too: USERGROUP2010

Meeting Details

Date: Thursday, 19 August
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: INM United

Meeting Note:

There is no meeting on our regularly schedule date of 8 August 2010.

Abstract:

From http://whyday.org : On August 19, 2009, Why the Lucky Stiff withdrew from the online community. We in the Ruby community wish him well, but we really miss him.

So come on out, ready to hack some Ruby code. If you need help setting up your laptop, no problem. There will be someone there ready to help. Bring some friends too. The more the merrier.

Announcements:

No announcements at this time.

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