Omaha Rails

Dusty Davidson is founder of the local development company BriteMix. BriteMix is a leader in the Omaha area for the development of advanced web applications. Some of their portfolio sites include Tripleseat, an event planning software for restaurants and Food & Spirits, a guide to the best food and dining in the Omaha Area.

Dusty will talk about their usage of Ruby on Rails for the development of the above sites and their deployment on Amazon.com's EC2 platform. Dusty will show what it takes to get a Rails application up and running on EC2, and some of the known gotchas for scaling your Rails app on the platform.

Ryan Bates of the ultra-popular Railscasts website will be joining our meeting on October 8th via an iChat video session. Ryan is unparalleled in the Rails community for along with his professionally done web casts, he has recently presented at RailsConf, helps moderate RailsForum, and has contributed to the Rails core.

Watch some of his tutorials and be thinking about questions that you can ask him. Some possibilities include :

Rails Specific

• How did you get started with Rails and why do you continue to use it over other alternatives (Django, Merb, etc)
• Where do you think the biggest bottlenecks exist within the Rails work development flow and how would you propose to solve them?
• What do you think is the biggest contribution Rails has made in changing the way you develop?

Developer Related

• Do you have any books (technical or not) that you are currently reading?
• When considering a new feature for Railscast, what is your approach to design? Do you like to start at the data level first or would you rather sketch up a couple of mockups and work from the UI?

Entrepreneurial

• Was it difficult in creating a following for the Railscasts website and did you do anything special in the beginning to lure in an audience?
• How did you go about getting your sponsors?

The QA session will last between 30 and 45 minutes. I will have a mic or two setup so that we can take turns asking questions.

If we have time I will do a second presentation. Since most of the developers at the meeting at least touch upon Java in their working careers, I thought it would be of benefit for the beginners to make a presentation that will compare and contrast some of the differences between development with J2EE/JavaEE and Rails. I will outline the tools and practices that make Rails unique. Topics covered will include convention over configuration, migrations, deployment, and basic meta-programming.

The inaugural meeting for the Omaha Rails User Group will be held on August 20th, 7pm.

We'll kick off the meeting by having everyone introduce themselves by giving a bit of your development background and a brief discussion of any Rails projects that you're currently working on.

After the introductions have been said, we'll discuss possible topics for future meetings and gather volunteers to do presentations. Here are some topic ideas :

• Merb (when is it a useful alternative?)
• Performance benchmarking
• RESTful concepts
• Behavior driven development with rSpec
• Deployment with Capistrano
• Scaling Solutions (Memcache, data sharding with DataFabric)
• New features in 2.1 (named_scope, etc)

Lastly, I will do a presentation on ActiveResource. Think "ActiveRecord for web services". If you follow the RESTful conventions that Rails sets up, you will see how easy it is to expose a service for other 3rd party sites to consume.

Meetings will be held at the AIM Institute's training lab at 412 S. 19th Street. Wireless access available.

I will be attending Barcamp Omaha on August 15-17th, so if you plan on attending please say hello.

I look forward to meeting everyone!

Jim Jones