Food/socializing at 6:00. Talks begin around 6:30.
Our ruby meet-up this month will include a demonstration of Dustin Zeisler's Visualize Ruby project and a review of some of the answers from the questionnaire sent out a couple months ago.

FOSCON is a free, fun gathering of Ruby fans held during an evening of O’Reilly’s OSCON conference, with cool presentations, food, and discussion.

Let’s have the first FOSCON planning meeting tomorrow—Thursday, July 10, 6pm, at the Side Door (425 SE Washington St., Portland 97214).

Please join us even if you haven’t participated in FOSCON before or aren’t sure how you can help, but have a few hours to spare within the next two weeks.

See you there!

-igal

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

NEW VENUE: This meeting's space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the Ruby signs.

Join a few Ruby programmers for dinner to explore alternatives to fixtures for use in tests.

We'd like to co-present our findings at the next pdxruby meeting.

Libraries we'd like to explore include factory_girl, machinist, and others: http://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_fixture_replacement.html

We can use existing open source Ruby software to experiment with, by making a branch, trying out the library, and requesting a merge if we like the changes. Apps we can contribute to include http://calagator.org , http://openconferenceware.org and http://pdxruby.org.

This is an ad hoc Ruby Newbies meetup, especially for those applying for the ELC Technologies internship program (though all are welcome). Come ask questions, eat, drink, and hack. Whether you're learning Ruby or would like to help those that are, come on by.

We'll have pizza & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations.

PRESENTATIONS at 7pm

One-Way Data Flow in Ruby

by Joshua Tompkins

A look at ReduxJS style one way data flow

Nitty Gritty Service Building

by Lauren Voswinkel

A how-to guide for not just building services, but extracting them from existing applications

After presentations we'll have more socializing time.

Thanks to New Relic for providing the venue and beer, pizza & snacks this month!

ARRIVING BY BIKE? Cyclists are welcome to park their bikes in the New Relic office. Bikes are not allowed in the building lobby, however, and must use the freight elevator. To get your bike up to the 29th floor, enter the building's parking lot by going down the ramp at 5th and Pine. Go past the booth -- no need to pick up a ticket -- and turn right. Go straight until you almost run into the elevator lobby, then go right again. On the back side of the elevator block you'll see a beat up pair of double doors marked "freight elevator." You can get up by buzzing in with the intercom, and saying you're here for New Relic. Ride on up to the 29th floor, you'll easily find the bike parking.

ABOUT THE GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade, also known as pdxruby and pdx.rb, is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon area. The group welcomes all programmers interested in the language and its implementations, tools, libraries and frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails. The group has been meeting since August 2002 for presentations, demos and discussions. Every month 35-75 people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for Ruby. If you'd like to present or have a topic you'd like discussed, please post to the mailing list. The group usually meets on the first Tuesday of the month, "Ruby Tuesday" -- see you there!

Get together for lunch and talk Ruby, or something else! For those that have a hard time making it to the pdxrb meeting, and those that like to eat and talk about Ruby at the same time.

https://twitter.com/mperham/status/273197162265989120

TOPICS: * Bill Kayser of New Relic will talk about his company's Ruby products for tracking and identifying performance problems. * Group discussion on performance issues and how to fix them. Bring your questions! * Igal Koshevoy will talk about doing full-text searching using Sunspot to help your users find relevant information. * Igal Koshevoy will talk about building a simple, pluggable mechanisms to let folks running your code configure it to use a particular implementation of a feature, e.g. perform search using SQL, Sunspot or something else. * ...more!

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

PRESENTATIONS * Dhananjay Keskar will discuss how he "applied Ruby meta-programming for creating a DSL for interactive voice response menus for use in telephony apps": https://github.com/dkeskar/twilioflow * David Turnbull and coworkers will present their Googlyscript gem, "a high-performance Closure Compiler build tool": https://github.com/dturnbull/googlyscript * Igal Koshevoy will talk about, "Things I Like About Ruby: A perspective gained from spending too much time writing enterprise application frameworks using sh, awk and sed"

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

Let's meet up and talk about Ruby!

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This an open-to-the-public meetup at the Open Source Bridge conference in the Portland Art Museum's Mark Building. We're not sure what room we'll be in, so look for signage in the lobby for further directions.

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

The next Ruby Brigade meeting is coming soon. We've got a some great content lined up, including a special guest from Engine Yard traveling up to Portland just to give us a talk.

PRESENTATIONS:

1. "Ruby Hangman: April Fools Special" -- Markus Roberts will confound and amaze you with his latest puzzle.

2. "Machine Learning and Data Mining Using Ruby" -- Randall Thomas will present a quick and dirty introduction to machine learning and data mining, describe effective ways to apply these, and show how to make use of these using Ruby. Randall works at Engine Yard, is a classically-trained musician, tinkers with robotics, and enjoys coding with Ruby, Erlang and OCaml.

3. "Ruby fixture replacement issues and factory_girl tutorial" -- Igal Koshevoy will provide an overview of the Ruby tools, methods and divergent needs discussed at our recent fixture replacements meetup. He will also provide a quick tutorial of the "factory_girl" fixtures replacement library.

4. "Mid-month unstructured activity meetup discussion" -- The meetup to discuss fixtures replacement was a big success. I'd like to have more similar events in between regular meetings.

5. "Open Source Bridge 2010 raffle" -- You can win a free pass to the Open Source Bridge 2010 conference. For details and to apply, see: http://tinyurl.com/osb10-raffle-pdxruby

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

Topics: - Ruby Hangman puzzle by Markus Roberts - Sinatra and DataMapper by Jesse Cooke - Bundler by Igal Koshevoy - Coping with fixtures and fixture-like constructs discussion - More!

GROUP: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

ABOUT: The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

Meeting topics: * Markus Roberts presents some particularly puzzling code. * Maher Hawash presents BrowseCMS. * Igal Koshevoy presents ActiveScaffold and home-brewed Snippets. * Other Ruby-based CMS/blog discussions. * ...your great talk here! * And many other topics that come up at the meeting.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

PRESENTATIONS

1. "Ruby, Parser Generators, and External DSLs", Luke Kanies

Using Puppet's Parser as an example, we'll talk about using Parser Generators like YACC and ANTLR to create complete external DSLs - why you would, why you wouldn't, and what's different about them. We'll even delve into some of the more complicated bits like abstract syntax trees.

Luke Kanies has been publishing and speaking on his work in Unix administration since 1997. He has focused on tool development since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributing to established products like Cfengine. He founded Reductive Labs in 2005 as a response to the stagnation in sysadmin tools, to be a vehicle for changing the way we interact with and manage our computers. He founded and is the project lead for Puppet, an open-source automation framework written in Ruby, and he is always researching and developing new ways to make it easier to talk to computers on your terms. He has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.

1. "MapProjection, a geographical projection library for Ruby", Duncan Beevers

Duncan is a wrangler of many technologies, primarily Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and ActionScript these days at Kongregate.

1. We're looking for more talks, suggest yours on the mailing list today!

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

PRESENTATIONS

1. "Ruby Persistence with CouchDB", Jesse Hallett

There are several libraries out there that provide high level interfaces between Ruby and CouchDB. I will give an overview of some of them, discuss the pros and cons of each, and show how these libraries make working with CouchDB easier. Along the way I will talk about the particular types of problems that CouchDB is good at solving.

Jesse Hallett has been designing web applications with Ruby for nearly three years now. He has worked on administrative / record-keeping applications, CMS and Ecommerce platforms, and various other pieces of software. He spends as much time as possible with his fellow geeks in organizations like the Portland Ruby Brigade and the Portland JavaScript Admirers. Jesse has developed a strong interest in the evolving state-of-the-art of client-side JavaScript technology and next generation databases. Jesse is currently developing JavaScript technology at Jive Software.

1. "Testing iPhone apps with Ruby and Cucumber", Ian Dees

This talk begins with a survey of the landscape of iPhone UI testing. In particular, we’ll discuss the groundbreaking work done by Matt Gallagher in stimulating and spidering the iPhone UI with an XPath test script. That will be a natural jumping-off point to explain why a full-fledged “GUI driver” for iPhone apps has been long in coming. We’ll look at different ways to prod at application code, and discuss the tradeoffs. Finally, I’ll introduce a simple library of Ruby glue code to connect Cucumber test scripts to the iPhone. The technique will be very basic, but just powerful enough to test a simple iPhone app.

Pizza, learning and a great time to network with the fabulous PHP Community!

Does your site have a good search mechanism? Does it offer adequate quality for results? Is it a sustainable solution for the foreseeable scale required by your site? This week Chris Irvine will share experiences from a recent project, where he converted a site's traditional search method over to a search service, specifically AWS CloudSearch. Key topics will be:

What can go wrong with typical RDBMS based search solutions?
What is a search service? What does AWS CloudSearch offer specifically?
Live demo: Setup a sample search domain and explore available features
A look at the AWS PHP SDK
Case study: Walk through implementation details for a given site

* How much improvement did we measure? What didn't work?
* Lessons learned, the good and bad of The Cloud.

Chris Irvine is a Senior Technology Consultant and founder at Threeprong.com LLC, specializing in performance tuning, B2B integration, and custom workgroup solutions. He's local to the Portland area and a PSU alum. His professional experience includes management roles in multiple industries, and numerous development and database environments. Much of his recent projects have been in PHP/MySQL, Python, and also the FileMaker workgroup and mobile platforms.

Ian Dees saw his first Timex Sinclair 1000 over 20 years ago, and was instantly hooked. Since then, he’s debugged embedded assembly code using an oscilloscope, written desktop apps in C++, and joyfully employed scripting languages to make testing less painful. Ian currently writes GUI code for handheld instruments as a Software Engineer at Tektronix. Ian is the author of the book Scripted GUI Testing With Ruby: http://pragprog.com/titles/idgtr

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

Informal meetup targeted at newcomers to Ruby as well as experienced programmers. Bring your laptop and your desire to learn.

Experienced Rubyists welcome; we will encourage newbies to self-teach during these sessions so you should have a great place to hack in peace.

Informal meetup targeted at newcomers to Ruby. Bring questions. Drink $beverage. Hack. Experienced Rubyists welcome; we want you to share your expertise!

If you have a question or a topic you'd like discussed at the meeting, feel free to post to the mailing list.

Informal meetup targeted at newcomers to Ruby as well as experienced programmers. Bring your laptop and your desire to learn.

Experienced Rubyists welcome; we will encourage newbies to self-teach during these sessions so you should have a great place to hack in peace.