July 14 NovaRUG: Radiant CMS: How to Understand, Use, and Extend It by Jim Gay
The July 14th meeting of the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group will feature Jim Gay, the lead developer of Radiant CMS.
See the NovaRUG web site for details and to sign up.
Posted by Gray Herter: July 14, 2010
New Videos Coming on Line
We have some new videos recently posted, including Kyle Banker's MongoDB talk and Nick Gauthier's talk on speeding up your tests. Visit the video page and take a look.
Posted by Gray Herter: May 24, 2010
Jim Wierich's Conference Video is Now Live
Our first RubyNation conference video is now live. It features Jim Wierich and his well received "SOLID Ruby" talk. I hope everyone enjoys it. The remaining videos will be going live at the rate of two per week over the upcoming weeks.
Posted by David Keener: May 21, 2010
Thanks Everyone!
Thanks for coming to RubyNation everyone! Speaking on behalf of the organizers and volunteers, we had a blast! It was so much fun that we are already planning for next year, starting with our retrospective meeting next week (Help us by filling out our survey).
Thanks to all of the speakers. We were a big success due primarily to your twenty-nine great presentations! The DC Ruby community and the RubyNation organizers appreciates the time and effort you all put out to be here.
And of course thanks to all of our organizers and volunteers. Many people don't realize that RubyNation is really the result of the volunteer work of almost a dozen people. Their efforts really helped this conference reach a new level this year.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 15, 2010
Help Us Plan for Next Year. Fill Out Our Survey!
Please take a moment to help us by taking our survey. We want to know what you think, so we can better plan for next year. Should we relocate, add another track, get a specific speaker you love? Just tell us what you think.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 10, 2010
SpeakerRate our Speakers!
We have a RubyNation SpeakerRate page! Even the big name speakers want to see what you think. And your input can help some of our lesser known speakers into the big time! Please help out the speakers, and us, by providing feedback.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 10, 2010
Go to the ruBy-B-Q
Be sure to go to the ruBy-B-Q after Dave Thomas' Keynote talk. Good food and beer. What's not to like with that? The directions are available from Mapquest.
We will also have printed directions that we will hand out.
The hotel shuttle can also take you over there and return you to the hotel, if you don't have a ride. It is close enough to walk, but the Reston Parkway is a pretty big road to walk along, and we wouldn't recommend that. Ride the shuttle or bum a ride with someone. See the front desk, if you have trouble figuring out what to do, and we will help you out.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 09, 2010
A Live Blog
Here is a Live Blog of RubyNation 2010. Lots to read of one person's perspective (OK, Brian's) on the conference.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 09, 2010
Jeff Kunkle Presents "Git Guts"
Does Git seem like a pinch of familiar version control concepts combined with a whole lot of black magic? If you're new to distributed version control systems the thought of how Git pulls off it's incredible speed and effortless branching can be intimidating. However, if you pull back the covers long enough to understand what's going on inside, you'll find there's nothing to fear.
This talk looks at the fundamental concepts of Git, exposing its brilliant simplicity with descriptions of the various object types, references, and branches. This talk isn't going to cover the laundry list of Git commands, but it should leave you feeling surprisingly confident about using Git.
Jeff is the Chief Technology Officer at Near Infinity corporation, a small software development, training, and consulting-services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has spent the past eight years leading Agile-focused development teams and creating web-based systems and applications. The majority of his programming experience lies in Ruby/Rails, Java and Groovy/Grails, with Objective-C as a personal spare-time learning pursuit.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 07, 2010
Michael Bleigh Presents "Persistence Smoothie - Blending SQL and NoSQL in Ruby Applications"
With such a vibrant and emerging economy of new persistence options for web applications it can be diffcult to know when and how to use them in your applications. Worse yet, you don't want to lose mountains of existing infrastructure and support for RDBMS systems in Rails. What's a developer to do? Blend it! Learn new techniques for using multiple persistence engines in a single application.
About the Speaker: Michael Bleigh is the Creative Director and Open Source Activist at Intridea, Inc. He has created a number of popular Ruby open-source projects and plugins and has spoken at RailsConf, RailsConf Europe, and Confoo.ca.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 07, 2010
RubyNation Welcomes New Sponsor Intridea
RubyNation is happy to introduce our new Gold sponsor, Intridea.
Intridea designs and develops better applications for mobile devices and the web. For clients ranging from startups with just an idea to firmly established Fortune 500 companies, Intridea builds high quality software that looks as great as it performs. Intridea knows what it takes to make client projects successful in the longer term. They also have their own suite of products developed in-house, including the Present.ly microblogging platform and Scalr, their cloud computing solution. Intridea specializes in Ruby on Rails, iPhone, and Android development, but are a firm proponent of choosing the right tool for the job.
Intridea has been a long time supporter of the Ruby and Rails community, sponsoring and running the DC Ruby users group for many years, and supplying several excellent RubyNation speakers, including this year's Michael Bleigh and Jeremy McAnally. For more information visit the Intridea web site.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 04, 2010
Engine Yard's Corey Donohoe Presents "Mock Aren't Stubs, and Fakes Are Better"
Rubyists love testing. The testing landscape is always evolving and changing. As a rubyist we have the opportunity to lead by example in this space. Corey proposes that as library developers we should be providing environments that give people every excuse to explore and develop through testing. This can be accomplished through fakes.
Corey will cover the approach taken at Engine Yard for library development as well as the other common routes that people take when trying to create or integrate with an existing service. They have found that they have tests that are more clear and less brittle by providing fakes.
Corey is Engine Yard's oldest technical employee and currently maintains a large part of the internal application infrastructure used by Engine Yard employees and customers.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 04, 2010
Matz presents Ruby2 - Finally Ready for the Enterprise in 2010!
Yukihiro Matsumoto (newly minted Chief Ruby Architect at Oracle), will join RubyNation live via satellite from Japan to discuss how Oracle's acquisition of Ruby finally makes our favorite language ready for the enterprise. With the impending release of the Ruby Language Specification 2 version 1.0 and Sun's Ruby Virtual Machine™, Matz will describe how developers and architects can leverage best practices for these upcoming, exciting changes:
- Ruby Community Process® Program - controlled changes to Ruby via Ruby Specification Request® (RSR) committees
- Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition™ - the reference Rails Application Container®
- Introduction of type-safety to the language with Ruby Generics™
- Extensive XML-based configuration and mapping
- n-tiered Ruby, hyper-threaded Ruby, Rails Enterprise Beans®, rant build tool and much, much more!
Get excited about Ruby2v1.0 - Ready for the Enterprise!
Update: April Fools! Sorry, we couldn't resist.
Posted by Ruby Nation: April 01, 2010
Welcome Back Gold Sponsor CodeSherpas
RubyNation is pleased to announce three-time sponsor CodeSherpas as a Gold sponsor of RubyNation 2010. CodeSherpas creates custom software and integrated technology solutions tailored to the individual business needs of their clients. They deliver new capabilities and extend their clients business reach by enabling them to provide their product or service to a larger market. For more information visit the CodeSherpas' web site.
For developers, CodeSherpas offers training on Ruby, Rails and Agile methodologies. Contact them at 888-650-7829 for details.
CodeSherpas' developers support open source projects and have released several gems, including Crondonkulous, Stonepath, Stonewall, Sentient_user, Userstamp_basic. For more on these, visit their github
Be sure to catch CodeSherpas founder, David Bock's talk on "Modeling Workflow in Ruby on Rails with StonePath".
Posted by Gray Herter: March 31, 2010
Jeff Barr Presents "Amazon Web Services - The Latest Developments"
Amazon Web Services Senior Evangelist Jeff Barr will discuss the latest developments in AWS including the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and the Amazon Relational Database Service. Jeff will show how these services can be used to build powerful and highly scalable applications in the cloud.
Jeff will introduce the EC2 Gem to instantiate EC2 objects (instances, IP addresses, and disk volumes), and then connect them to each other, all through code, driving home a really important fact about the cloud -- that it is fully programmable and that a set of powerful APIs sits at the base of the stack.
Jeff Barr is focused on furthering awareness of web services and inspiring developers to create innovative applications using Amazon Web Services. Barr meets regularly with developers throughout the U.S. and abroad to introduce Amazon Web Services' expanding platform and showcase businesses that currently utilize the program's services. He is the author of Host Your Web Site in the Cloud to be published in March 2010 by SitePoint.
Barr joined Amazon in August 2002 as a Senior Software Developer on the Associates team and has a longstanding interest in web services and programmatic information interchange. He has held development and management positions at Microsoft, KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, was a co-founder of Visix Software, and holds a degree in Computer Science from the American University in Washington, DC. Jeff is also the principal voice behind the AWS Blog.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 30, 2010
EngineYard Ruby Summer of Code Contest!
EngineYard has a contest up for two RubyNation tickets right now. Check out @engineyard.
"Would *you* like to attend the sold out @RubyNation? Make any contribution to @rubysoc within the next three hours and be entered to win!"
Posted by Gray Herter: March 25, 2010
RubyNation is Sold Out!
We are sold out! This is even after adding a few seats. We will add a waiting list soon, in case some more tickets become available, a handful usually do as we get closer to the event. So, if you didn't get a ticket and want one, join the waiting list and we will contact you.
Update: The waiting list is on the eventbrite registration page.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 24, 2010
Nathaniel Talbott presents "Developing Customers"
Startups don't fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model." So says Steve Blank, entrepreneur, Stanford professor, and author of the excellent "Four Steps to the Epiphany". And he's right: if you look at the startup graveyard, you'll find it cluttered with lots of great products that no one would pay for.
As a developer this is a pretty discouraging realization. As makers, our skills center around creating a product, not around finding a market. So how do we take our maker skills and apply them to what Steve calls the "Customer Development Process"? That's exactly what this talk will explore, including a crash course in Customer Development and a roadmap any developer can follow to make sure they're building a product that is actually viable.
If you have an entrepreneurial bone in your body you won't want to miss it!
Nathaniel runs Spreedly, Terralien, and has an entrepreneurial itch that just won't go away. Beware, it may be contagious! communities.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 23, 2010
Welcome Back Three-Time Sponsor FGM
RubyNation is pleased to announce the return of Gold sponsor FGM. FGM has been deeply supportive of the Washington Ruby community for many years now, hosting the NovaRUG meetings at their facility in Reston, and providing speakers and sponsorship of RubyNation for three years now.
FGM, Inc., is an information technology company delivering sophisticated, customized solutions that improve business efficiency across the enterprise. As a trusted partner of the Department of Defense, U.S. Government civilian and international agencies, and businesses throughout the world, FGM is an agile provider of technical solutions that enable mission-critical operations and decision-making. FGM's solutions help customers improve their business performance through information technology transformation services focusing on architecture, information management, systems integration, and integrated solutions.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 22, 2010
Dave McVicar presents "Building a Social Video Contest Platform in Ruby on Rails"
Dave's presentation explores the technical...and social...challenges inherent in building and operating a social network application, the Department of State's ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest, for an international audience. On the technical front, the presentation exposes how technical challenges were solved, from handling video uploads to streaming videos on demand. Then the presentation goes beyond the technical, to show how users interact with the features of social applications, for both good and ill. This section covers practical aspects such as reviewing videos before they go live, sub-contests, managing foreign-language content, handling "cheaters" who attempt to sway the rating system and influencing the behavior of users to achieve desired objectives.
Dave McVicar is a Senior Solutions Architect for MetroStar Systems, Inc., a developer of Social Networking Solutions for Government clients. Dave has been developing software for nearly forty years and has led engineers in the Agile development of more than ten Ruby on Rails web applications. In his life before Rails, Dave designed high-speed check processing and archival systems for the international banking community. In his seven years at AOL, Dave was a product innovator and Ruby on Rails evangelist, and launched circaVie and Pixnay (now part of bebo.com). Dave's current Rails work is in the area of contest platforms that engage social networking communities.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 22, 2010
Russ Olsen presents "Looking Inside Your Ruby Implementation"
Ever wonder how it all works? How Matz sat down with nothing but a C compiler and an editor and ended up with Ruby? How the JRuby guys are making the JVM livable again? In this talk, Russ Olsen will take you on a quick tour of the Ruby 1.9 C implementation as well as the Java behind JRuby. During this talk Russ will demo how to use both gdb and Eclipse to watch the gears and cogs spinning as your Ruby program runs.
Russ Olsen's career spans three decades, during which he has written everything from graphics device drivers to document management applications. These days, Russ diligently codes away at GIS systems, web service security and process automation solutions with both J2EE and Rails. Russ spends a lot of his otherwise free time talking and writing about programming, especially Ruby and Clojure. Russ is the author of Design Patterns In Ruby and the Technology As If People Mattered blog. Russ' technical pontifications have been translated into six languages and Russ has spoken at various conferences including Paris On Rails, Developer Day, RubyNation and the VTM Professional Ruby Conference. Russ is currently hard at work on another book about Ruby.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 22, 2010
David Keener presents "Leveraging Rails to Build FaceBook Applications"
David Keener will present a distillation of some of the practical tactics that his development team at MetroStar Systems has used to create highly successful FaceBook applications using Rails, including real-life systems like PollCast and Iran Voices. FaceBook is the world's largest social network, with over 350 million members.
David is a solutions architect for MetroStar Systems, a fast-growing consulting firm providing services to government agencies, non-profits organizations and the commercial sector. Dave has over 23 years of experience, specializing in Ruby, Rails, Java and social media. He is a frequent public speaker, and is involved in the NovaRUG, NovaJUG and DCRUG user groups. David is a member of the RubyNation Steering Committee. His RubyNation responsibilities also include video production this year, for both the videotaping of conference sessions and the production of a television documentary about the conference. He also blogs regularly on Internet-related subjects at KeenerTech.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 21, 2010
Damon Feldman presents "Ruby and the XML Database"
Ruby provides a variety of powerful tools (Builder, LibXML, ReXML, etc.) for creating and parsing XML data. Unfortunately, this power doesn't translate to the databases we typically use for storing our XML data. These databases simply weren't designed to handle XML and therefore it becomes very cumbersome (at best) to manage our XML storage with these tools. This mismatch of capabilities can cripple our ability to work effectively with our XML data within Ruby. This talk focuses on removing that capability mismatch by combining Ruby with an XML database. An important part of this integration is ensuring that the tools and frameworks that we currently use, such as Rails, continue to be usable.
Damon Feldman is a Senior Consultant with Mark Logic, a vendor of an XML Server that runs XQuery code. Prior to working with XQuery, he worked for years in object-oriented systems, including Smalltalk, Java and Ruby. He also holds a doctorate in computer science from Tulane University, where he studied programming languages with a focus on functional and logic languages.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 20, 2010
We're sponsoring the Cap-Clug/NovaJUG Clojure meeting
RubyNation is sponsoring a talk introducing the Clojure language tonight. This talk features Stu Halloway and Rich Hickey, the inventor of the language. To read about it visit the sign up page.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 17, 2010
Joe O'Brien and Jim Wierich present "Tales of the Resistance; A Dialog on the Ruby Insurgency"
Joe and Jim present a dialog between Seamus and his boss, Ian, with the fate of Ruby in the balance.
Seamus sits at his desk putting the final touches on his Ruby script for reconciling invoices when he hears his boss' footsteps.
He's not doing anything wrong, Ian is a reasonable man, but Seamus knows that Ruby isn't officially sanctioned by the committee for software standardization and furniture placement.
Will he get in trouble?
Ruby has been so useful that he's decided that now is the time he's going to take a stand. Last week he talked to Conner at the pub after the Ruby Brigade and they came up with a strategy for Ruby adoption. Will Seamus succeed? Stay tuned for tales of the resistance.
Joe O'Brien is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.
Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 16, 2010
David Bock presents "Modeling Workflow in Ruby on Rails with StonePath"
"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.
Based on his experience in Federal and Local Governments as well as legal compliance applications for the enterprise, David has created the StonePath Project, a Ruby gem that allows you to model state-and-task-based workflow. In this talk, David will talk about this modeling methodology, the code to implement it, and how it has been used successfully in applications for the U.S. State Department, The Washington D.C. School System, and several Fortune 500 companies. You will leave this talk about to use the StonePath gem for your own workflow modeling needs.
David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a consultancy specializing in Java and Ruby software development. He is the past President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, a founder of the Northern Virginia Ruby User Group, an Editor for O'Reilly, and a technical reviewer for over 20 software engineering books. David is a frequent speaker on Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, and Project Management.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 16, 2010
Less Than 20 Tickets Left
We now have less than 20 tickets left. A couple of the taken ones are sponsor tickets that might eventually become unclaimed. But regardless we expect to run out of available seats very soon.
Click here to register!
Posted by Gray Herter: March 13, 2010
40 Tickets Left
There are now less than 40 tickets left with registrations picking up as we get closer to the conference. Register soon!
Posted by Gray Herter: March 06, 2010
Jeremy McAnally presents "Rails 3: Living in the Future"
There's a lot of Rails 2.x series code floating around. This talk is a practical walkthrough of how to upgrade an app to Rails 3 and a look at some of the features one can use to improve existing codebases.
Jeremy McAnally has been developing applications with Ruby and Rails for a little over five years, but before that he tortured himself with PHP, C#, Python, VB, and other instruments of destruction. After finding the light, he worked with Ruby for a while and penned "Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book" (soon to be published by No Starch). Since then he has continued writing software, books (such as "Ruby in Practice"), open-source code (such as dcov, context, and more), presentations for numerous Ruby conferences and user groups, blogs at omgbloglol, and basically done anything he can to sharpen his Ruby (and Rails)-Fu. He likes good food, good times, and a mean game of Wii Sports Resort Tennis.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 02, 2010
50 Tickets Left
There are less than 50 tickets left for this year's RubyNation. At the current registration rate, we should sell out well before the end of March. I've extended the early bird registration period until March 26th, so everyone should be able to get a relatively cheap ticket (thank you, sponsors!). At that price, this is the conference deal of the year, so please don't miss out. Register soon.
Posted by Gray Herter: March 01, 2010
March 3rd NovaRUG Features "Dynamic Generation of Images and Video with Ruby-Processing" by Jeff Casimir
RubyNation is sponsoring the March 3rd meeting of the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group. The meeting will feature RubyNation 2010 speaker Jeff Casimir, who will present "Dynamic Generation of Images and Video with Ruby-Processing". Come and help Jeff as he preps this talk for the Mountain West Ruby Conference.
See the NovaRUG web site for details and to sign up.
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.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 26, 2010
Welcome Platinum Sponsor Engine Yard!
RubyNation is very pleased to announce Engine Yard as a Platinum Sponsor. Engine Yard provides automation technologies and services for Ruby on Rails, including Engine Yard Cloud, an application services platform for web developers and web teams. Engine Yard sponsors or contributes to many Open Source projects such as Ruby on Rails, JRuby and Rubinius. Engine Yard is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com. Visit Engine Yard's web site, or follow them via Engine Yard's twitter feed.
On a personnel level, the RubyNation organizers want to recognize Engine Yard as a consistent friend of the RubyNation conference, providing fantastic speakers and much needed sponsorship for the past three years. Thank you, Engine Yard!
Posted by Gray Herter: February 25, 2010
Jeff Casimir presents "How to Teach Anything to Anyone, Even Your Dev Team"
Michael Jordan will never be an effective NBA coach. He was the greatest player ever, but being great at something is a fundamentally different skill set than being able to coach others to greatness.
The Ruby community moves too quickly for any of us to be an expert in everything. We all need to be both teachers and learners, coaches and players.
Being a great programmer won't make you a great coach. As programmers and managers, you can multiply your impact by raising the game of those around you. Like basketball, there are just a few techniques that you need to be great - then it takes practice. In this session we'll crunch years of education study and practice into three principles you can deploy tomorrow.
In this session we'll explore each concept then work through examples applying them to the typical development shop. Attendees will leave with the understanding and framework to be great teachers.
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.
Jeff is also a Ruby developer and loves discussing the art of building development teams and shops. Jeff believes that effective teaching strategies can take these teams to the next level.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 24, 2010
Glenn Vanderburg presents "Enabling the Enterprise"
There is a kind of software development called "Enterprise Software Development." It's aimed at the problems of large corporate enterprises. It has its own tools, methods, and architectures.
And it doesn't work. Not even for large corporate enterprises.
Enterprises have been told that they have unique problems that smaller groups don't have. But do they really? And if they do, are they really the problems that enterprise tools are designed to solve? In this talk, Glenn will explain why the real problem of enterprise software development is "Enterprise Software Development."
Glenn Vanderburg is a principal at Relevance, Inc. He has worked in enterprises of all sizes, using tools that range from the ridiculous to the sublime. This year, he's spending his days wrangling Ruby and Clojure.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 23, 2010
Neal Ford presents "Rails in the Large"
Neal Ford will present "Rails in the Large: How Agility Allows Us to Build One of the World's Biggest Rails Apps." While others have been debating whether Rails can scale to enterprise levels, we've been demonstrating it. ThoughtWorks is running one of the largest Rails projects in the world, for an Enterprise. This session discusses tactics, techniques, best practices, and other things we've learned from scaling rails development. We'll discuss infrastructure, testing, messaging, optimization, performance, and the results of lots of lessons learned, including killer rock-scissors-paper tricks to help you avoid babysitting the view tests!
Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is the designer/developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books. He also speaks at lots of conferences.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 22, 2010
Welcome Diamond Sponsor MetroStar Systems!
RubyNation is very pleased to announce MetroStar Systems as a Diamond Sponsor. For over 10 years, Information Technology provider, MetroStar Systems, has transformed from a start-up into one of America's Fastest Growing Companies, as ranked by Inc. Magazine. Innovative and diverse experience allows MetroStar to provide its clients with agile, collaborative solutions designed to integrate people, processes, technology, and learning across organizational and geographical boundaries through six solution groups: Portal Strategy & Implementation, System Integration, Enterprise Infrastructure Support, Business Intelligence, New Media Technology, and Training & Education. The privately held, Virginia-based firm is certified 8(a) and specializes in systems and software integration for many public sector and commercial clients.
In addition to sponsoring, MetroStar Systems will provide a beer and BBQ bash party, to close out the first day of RubyNation.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 18, 2010
Jon Larkowski presents "Pure RSpec"
Go beyond the well-worn fundamentals of RSpec. No more will you simply set a bunch of instance variables in before-each blocks. We'll explore the latest (and apparently not-super-well-known) features of RSpec. And not just technical syntax, but also the higher-level patterns and refactorings implied. Topics include: let, subject, its, expect, shared examples, shoulda matchers, stub_chain, unstub, spork, rspactor, and integration testing.
Jon "Lark" Larkowski is employee number one or two at Hashrocket, depending on how you count. He holds an Electrical Engineering/Computer Science degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jon co-founded RubyJax: Jacksonville, Florida's best and only Ruby user group. He heroically escaped a bleak, dystopian world of .Net, grey cubicles and demoralizing waterfall methodologies, and now luxuriates beachside under palms, enjoying agile project management and extreme Rails development. Jon hails from scenic Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, home of speedy Cray Supercomputers and refreshing Leinenkugel's beer. Lately, he's into the easier kinds of yoga, the heavier brands of Scandinavian progressive metal, and the spinnier style of ping pong.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 17, 2010
Brian Sam-Bodden presents "Component-Oriented Web Applications in Ruby"
Trellis is a component-based, event-driven Web micro-framework that provides a DSL to describe web applications in terms of pages, components and events. It combines the best features of desktop application development and modern MVC frameworks like Rails and Sinatra. Trellis pushes the complexity of building web applications onto components allowing you to build simple lightweight applications or complex, feature-rich applications.
Brian Sam-Bodden is a developer, author and speaker that has spent over fifteen years building software in variety of languages. In the last four years his concentration has been on the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails framework (although he still gets paid to do Java when no one is watching). Brian heads Integrallis, a Ruby/Groovy/Java shop with offices in Columbus, Ohio and Scottsdale, Arizona.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 11, 2010
Kyle Banker presents "MongoDB: The Way and its Power"
MongoDB seems like a great idea. But when it comes to building an application, we may start to miss all those patterns familiar to us from relational databases. Where are my joins? How do I handle polymorphic associations? Here, we'll examine a dozen ideas for working the MongoDB way, including plenty of code examples. These techniques will highlight the unique features of the database, among them atomic updates, map/reduce, and the notion of embedded documents. We'll also consider the hard questions, including how to achieve durability, plan for scale, and reassure our relational-database-oriented brethren of the viability of a document database like MongoDB. You'll come away with a good sense for the surprises and joys of building apps in MongoDB.
Kyle Banker works at 10gen, where he maintains the MongoDB Ruby Driver and supports the Ruby developer community. Previously, Kyle built e-commerce and social networking applications, and he once thrived as teacher of languages and literature.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 09, 2010
Gregg Pollack Presents "Deciphering Yehuda"
Gregg Pollack will present "Deciphering Yehuda" at RubyNation.
Yehuda Katz has done some great Ruby refactoring for Rails 3 over the past year, but do you really understand what he's done? In this talk, Gregg Pollack will attempt to examine Yehuda's work, identify and deconstruct each programming technique that he's applied, and then teach them in a way that everyone can understand.
Some of the techniques to be discussed will include: Method Compilation vs Method Missing, Decoupling Components, Embracing Rack, alias_method_chain vs super, Abstract Classes, and Componentization.
Attendees should walk away with a greater understanding of some advanced Ruby design patterns and a better insight into the internals of Rails 3.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 07, 2010
Speaker Selection Slowed by Snow!
Ok, snow and some laziness. We are not quite done contacting everyone. And with the big storm coming, we am not sure we will finish that before the end of tomorrow. So, we are extending the notifications/confirmations for one week, until the 12th. That should allow for plenty of time to work out the details with all of the speakers, and contact everyone who submitted.
The good news is that we are arranging for many more speakers this year than last. We will have more than 20, for sure. The bad news is that we did receive over 60 proposals, so there is no way to accept them all of course, even though almost all of them were very good proposals. We should also take this time to thank everyone who did submit a proposal. This year will rock because of it.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 04, 2010
Jim Weirich presents "SOLID Ruby"
It is our pleasure to announce that Jim Weirich will present "SOLID Ruby" at this year's RubyNation.
The 5 SOLID design principles (the Single Responsibility Principle, the Open/Closed Principle, the Liskov Substitution Principle, the Interface Segregation Principle and the Dependency Inversion Principle) form a great foundation for understanding good Object Oriented design. But the SOLID principles were originally conceived with statically typed OO languages, such as C++ and Java, in mind. How well do these principles hold up when the implementation language is Ruby? Are the principles just as pertinent as they were in Java, or does the dynamic nature of Ruby change what we mean by good design? In this presentation we will examine the SOLID principles to understand their core purpose, and then run them through the "Ruby Filter" to see if any of these core principles survive. By understanding these principles, we become better Ruby programmers.
Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 04, 2010
Paul Barry will Present "Blocks, Procs and Lambdas, Oh My! Functional Programming in Ruby"
We are very proud to announce that Paul Barry will present "Blocks, Procs and Lambdas, Oh My! Functional Programming in Ruby" at this year's RubyNation.
Despite being an object-oriented language, Ruby contains functional programming features as well. This talk will cover what those features are, provide an in-depth look into how they work, and present examples of how to use them. Paul will also compare Ruby to other functional programming languages such as Clojure, Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, JavaScript and Scala to show you how you can incorporate techniques commonly used in those languages to improve your Ruby code.
Paul Barry is a Software Developer from Baltimore, MD. Paul has over 10 years experience developing web applications in a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java, Perl, PHP and of course, Ruby on Rails. Paul has been a speaker at ActsAsConf and RubyNation and is a regular attendee and speaker at DC and Baltimore programming user groups. He blogs about Ruby, Programming and a variety of other topics at paulbarry.com.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 01, 2010
Nick Sieger presents"Rails: The Killer Java Web Stack"
We are very proud to announce that Nick Sieger of Engine Yard's JRuby team will present "Rails: The Killer Java Web Stack" at RubyNation.
Most people know that Rails is the original productive web application framework that all the others copied, and most know that it has been runnable on the Java Virtual Machine for years via JRuby. What a lot of people don't know is how to properly integrate Rails and Java; that is, how to incrementally introduce Rails into your legacy Java environment and leverage its strengths without ditching your Java infrastructure.
Finally, all the pieces are in place to make Rails development and deployment in a polyglot Java environment possible. Rails 3 brings all the goodness of Rails in bite-size, composable chunks. Ant and Maven are becoming more Ruby- and Rake-savvy, so you don't have to give up your build infrastructure. Multiple database possibilities await, so you don't necessarily have to switch to ActiveRecord. Use Ruby and Rails where it hurts the most to give your project more flexibility!
In this session Nick will make recommendations on some of the best ways to making Rails and Java play nicely together using JRuby, and run through some demos of the more practical ways to get things done. Most exciting, you'll get a preview of the quickly-evolving JRuby on Rails stack.
Nick Sieger is an engineer at Engine Yard, working on JRuby and leading the effort to make the Java Virtual Machine a robust yet easy-to-use deployment platform for Rails and Ruby web applications. He created and co-maintains the JDBC adapter for ActiveRecord that JRuby on Rails uses for database connectivity, as well as the Warbler tool and JRuby-Rack library for dealing with Java application server deployment.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 29, 2010
Call for Presentations is Closed
We received lots of great proposals this year. Thanks for submitting them, and helping us create a great conference. We hope to get through them all this week and notify people on or before February 5th of the selections.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 25, 2010
More Tickets Posted
I just released the Early Bird tickets. We will keep those available until March 1, or until they are all gone (until we are sold out, that is).
Posted by Gray Herter: January 22, 2010
More Tickets Coming Soon.
We sold out of the Super Early Bird variety already. I will give the magic spreadsheet one more look tonight and put up the rest of the tickets after that.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 21, 2010
Added Some More Super Early Bird Tickets
We were down to one Super Early Bird ticket left, so I added 10 more. It didn't seem fair to let these run out on the day of the DC Ruby group meeting! After those are gone we will switch over to the next level, which should be $40 or so more (unless the magic spreadsheets says something different once I give it the latest figures)!
Posted by Gray Herter: January 14, 2010
Still Need Those Proposals, Folks!
Speak to us! We have received a bunch of great proposals, but here is always room for one more - yours! We want to out do last year, so help us out.
And if you are local to DC, and not a world-famous rubyist, don't worry. We are a regional conference, serving the broader DC area, so especially if you live around here, please submit a talk proposal. We purposely try to have a good mix of interesting local speakers, in with the bigger names. Honestly, often the locals are better anyway! So, submit that proposal and speak to the nation!
Call for presentations runs until January 22nd, so you have time. Just email your proposal to 'proposals at rubynation.org'.
Posted by Gray Herter: December 10, 2009
Dec 2 NovaRUG: Debugging Ruby by Aman Gupta
RubyNation is sponsoring the next NovaRUG meeting.
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
Register: NovaRUG Blog
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.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 27, 2009
RubyNation Welcomes Gregg Pollack
We are very happy to announce that Gregg Pollack will speak at RubyNation 2010.
Gregg is a well-known leader in the Ruby and Rails communities.
He works at
Envy Labs,
where he produces a
podcast,
creates
educational screencasts,
and develops websites with Rails.
He is a founder and current member of the Rails Activists,
a set of committed volunteers devoted to increasing the adoption of Rails.
Gregg also organizes the
Orlando Ruby Users Group,
and is also sometimes known as the Ruby on Rails guy in the
"Rails vs"
commercials or the
"C" in MVC.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 25, 2009
Sponsors Wanted!
Lead the Ruby Nation! Become a sponsor of the premier Ruby and Rails conference in the Nation’s Capital. Put your message before a large audience of engaged and interested Rubyists, influential thought leaders, who can bring your product or services into their organizations.
RubyNation is a two-day, dual-track technical conference held in Reston, Virginia held April 9-10, 2010 at the Reston Sheraton Hotel. The estimated attendance for the conference is 200 people (170 last year). The conference schedule features presentations from well-known professionals in the Ruby and Rails community, including featured speakers such as Dave Thomas. In addition, there will be approximately twenty other 45-minute technical talks and panel discussions.
In our third year, the RubyNation Conference will again bring the community’s top speakers and leaders together with motivated and excited attendees for an unforgettable conference experience. At RubyNation, we debate and discuss the latest trends, techniques, and tools in Ruby development, design, deployment, business and marketing. We are not a commercial conference. Staffed by committed volunteers, RubyNation is produced and presented by the National Capital Region’s Ruby and Rails Developers Community, as a non-profit event to promote Ruby, and encourage collaboration across the community.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 23, 2009
Announcing Dave Thomas Keynote Presentation
We are very proud to announce that Dave Thomas will present a keynote talk at RubyNation this year.
Dave Thomas is an internationally recognized expert Rubyist. He is a cornerstone of the Ruby community, and is personally responsible for many of its innovative directions and initiatives. Dave is a co-founder of the Pragmatic Programmers and the Pragmatic Bookshelf. He helped write the now-famous Agile Manifesto. He is the author of many books, including the best sellers The Pragmatic Programmer, Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby.
For the past two years, Dave has been a featured speaker at our kick off events held in conjunction with the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group, but he has never actually spoken at our conference! We are really looking forward to correcting that.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 17, 2009
Speak to the Nation, the RubyNation! Call for Presentations is Open.
Want to speak at RubyNation? Then submit a presentation proposal!
Presentations should focus on helping attendees by teaching from your experiences. The audience is primarily practicing rubyists (of all levels!), so talks should lean towards the technical side. All Ruby related topics will be considered. Each presentation should be 45 minutes long. Submit your proposal to 'proposals at rubynation.org' with the following information:
* Your name, phone number and email address
* A brief speaker bio, including photo (optional)
* Presentation title
* Abstract (<200 words)
* Target audience (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
Speakers will receive free admission to the conference, and the opportunity to address a large audience of talented and influential rubyists!
We need your proposal by Jan 22th. We will let you know on or before Feb 5th if your proposal has been accepted.
We look forward to seeing some great proposals!
Posted by Karen Gillison: November 17, 2009
Mark the Date for RubyNation 2010!
It's official! RubyNation 2010 will be held on April 9th and 10th at the Sheraton in Reston, Virginia. We will feature two tracks (we have two rooms reserved). We also plan to do the training day again on the 8th of April. So, mark the dates on your calendar. You don't want to miss out!
Posted by Gray Herter: October 23, 2009
RubyNation Photos
A variety of photos from RubyNation 2009 are now available on Flickr, compliments of Dave Bock, Geoff Adams (the techie who also solved our WIFI woes at the conference) and Don Anderson. The photos are divided into two sets.
Set 1 includes photos by Dave Bock and Geoff Adams. Dave Bock's photos cover Friday and the first half of Saturday. From mid-day Saturday on, all photos were taken by Geoff Adams. The link below points to the best photos, no near-duplicates, with at least one photo of every speaker.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davebock/sets/72157619708506242/
Set 2 includes all of the photos taken by Don Anderson, covering the first half of Friday and the last few hours of Saturday.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkeener2010/sets/72157622235729503/
As stated by Dave Bock, "All photos are released under an attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license for the world, with the RubyNation non-profit having commercial rights. If you want the hi-res originals, just ask."
Posted by David Keener: June 14, 2009
Give a Lightning Talk!
The RubyNation wants to hear your lightning talk! Whatever you want to talk, rave, or rant about, this is your chance. We don't care what it is, just as long as it is of interest to the Ruby community and relatively short (like 10 minutes max). Your lightning talk can be fun, like "X is awesome! It changed me as a person!", a call to arms, like "Help us build Y. The world needs it!", a plea, like "Let's put an end to the scourge of Z.". You've heard of opinionated software, well this is opinionated talking. So, let's hear yours. Oh, and please keep it no worse than PG-13 rated.
We will have two sessions devoted to lightning talks, so your chances of getting heard are good.
You can register your lightning talk at the conference when you check in (or anytime really, at our front desk). But if you know what it is now, let us know now, so we can start the list (we already know of three of them). Send your talk description to 'proposals at rubynation.org' with the following information:
- Your name
- Presentation title and short description
Posted by Gray Herter: June 01, 2009
