Hello Rubyist! 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 applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. Every month people come together to share their knowledge, projects and enthusiasm for Ruby.

Learn more about PDX.rb at: https://pdxruby.org/

Portland Ruby Brigade monthly meeting.

Come out and meet our new Ruby coordinator, Jonan! He is going to talk about current issues with the Ruby organizations and their efforts. There will also be a talk from a member of the Planet Argon team!

This month's meeting is sponsored by Planet Argon. We will have pizza and drinks starting at 6. See you there!

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-8pm

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!

If you are interested in getting a Ruby Certification or just mentoring others, come on out!!!

This event will focus on preparing attendees to take the Silver certification exam. This is a basic skill-level certification of knowledge on the background, grammar, classes, objects, and standard libraries of Ruby.

We are going to use a version of "EduScrum" to work through the subject issues each person needs to know for the exam. After an introduction, we will break out into groups and create a study plan to get each member of the the group up.

There will be pizza!

The Ruby Association Certified Ruby Programmer examinations are intended for engineers who design, develop, and/or operate Ruby-based systems, consultants who make Ruby-based system proposals, and instructors who teach Ruby. Those who are certified are recognized for their skills as Ruby engineers and as having high levels of Ruby-based system development capabilities. Those who pass the examination are certified by the Ruby Association as a Ruby Association Certified Ruby Programmer.

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!

Rails 6 is officially released! We will round up the major new features coming your way. It is an exciting release due to some big features coming upstream from the Basecamp and GitHub projects. Amongst the many minor updates, useful tweaks and bug fixes, Rails 6 will ship with two completely new frameworks: ActionText and ActionMailbox, and two big scalable-by-default features: parallel testing and multiple database support.

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

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-9pm

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!

We'll have pizza starting at 6pm, more details to come...

Thanks to The Dyrt for providing the rooftop venue this month!

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!

It's time to plan the Ruby Brigade's activities for the next year. We need to discuss the meeting presentations, select a content committee and plan out the coming year. We'll have pizza starting at 6pm, courtesy of New Relic, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the planning session!

The planning session will start about 6:30 and go for an hour.

Note: There will not be a bartender on staff for this event; it's BYOB! :)

Come out and socialize with your fellow Rubyists! Pizza & beer starting at 6pm

PRESENTATIONS - 7pm-8:30pm

Fluent Refactoring - Sam Livingston-Gray will give a presentation about refactoring a gnarly Rails controller method. DON'T PANIC! You don't actually need to know anything about refactoring to get something out of this talk. This is a lightly edited version of a talk Sam gave in 2013, so if you'd like a preview, you're welcome to check out the slides[1] and the code[2].
(Sam says "the intro never quite worked, so I'm just cutting that and jumping straight into the code.") [1] https://www.slideshare.net/geeksam/fluent-refactoring-cascadia-ruby-conf-2013-1021 [2] https://github.com/geeksam/fluent-refactoring

Come out to the CENTRL Office on the Eastside for Ruby Tuesday. We'll have pizza starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations. We are at a new venue this month because of construction at New Relic. Drinks are BYOB this month

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-9pm

• Intro to Scorpio - Scorpio is a ruby library that represents RESTful resources, built around OpenAPI. ~ Presentation by Ethan

• RailsConf Rewind - If anyone went to RailsConf 2019, please share what you learned or point out new resources for the group.

After presentations we'll have more socializing time.

Pizza & beer starting at 6pm!

PRESENTATIONS - 7pm-8:30pm

Code for PDX ~ Arthur Smid

Code for PDX is a local chapter of Code for America. Arthur will talk about tech for the public good and CONSUL (http://consulproject.org/en/), an open source software for participatory process built with Ruby on Rails.

Recyclable Cache Keys in Rails ~ Jared Mooney

Ruby on Rails has powerful caching features and Jared is going to share some of the insight he learned about managing cache keys on a recent project.

How Can We Handle Errors? ~ Mike Calhoun

Most of the time, exceptions and errors are the last thing we want to put substantial thought into and are often addressed in that order. We tend to not want to think hard about how things could go wrong. However, from traditional apps to APIs or ArgumentErrors to NameErrors, handling exceptions gracefully is crucial to healthy applications. Let’s take a closer look at the Ruby Exception library and some strategies for catching and handling errors. We will look at what happens when exceptions are handled too well or not well enough. We will also take a closer look at the types of exceptions you can expect and where you can expect them. Lastly we’ll explore some examples for exception handling and testing in common rails application contexts.

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

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-9pm

After presentations we'll have more socializing time.

Check Calagator (http://calagator.org/events/tag/pdxruby) for more info.

This month we will have a presentation by Maggie Dreyer about Puppet's use of JRuby and Jason Dinsmore on: Who? What? When? Human readable audit reporting for PaperTrail.

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.

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

PANEL 6:30-8/8:30

Ruby in Portland 2018 Retrospective and 2019 Forecast

• Michael Smith - Principal Engineer @ Puppet Labs
• Zach Davis - Chief Technologist @ Cast Iron Coding
• Lauren Voswinkel - Senior Software Engineer @ New Relic
• Reid Beels - CTO @ The Dyrt

After the panel please join us at Bailey's Taproom on 213 SW Broadway (3 minute walk) for casual socializing and networking.

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

Special Note! No presentations this month, instead:

6:00-6:30 - Hack & Help.

6:30-7:30 - Business Meeting to decide the Speaker Organizer for the next 6ish months.

7:30ish-8 - Socializing and Coding afterwards

8ish - ? - Bailey’s Taproom

Bring your laptop!

Presentations are returning in August.

We'll have pizza & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the meeting. After the meeting we'll have more socializing time.

Business Meeting 7pm-9pm

In lieu of presentations, we'll have a business meeting to discuss the future of PDX.rb. Come prepared to volunteer to keep this group going!

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

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-9pm

Pragmatic Microservices, by Randy Shoup, VPE @ Stitch Fix

If you are considering, or in the process of, moving to microservices, you probably want to come to this event. Randy Shoup, a 25-year tech veteran in Silicon Valley, will share his insights into whether and when an organization should consider migrating to microservices and how to do that successfully, referencing examples from Google, eBay, Stitch Fix, as well as many smaller organizations he has worked with.

The Talk

One of the most powerful trends in software today is building large systems out of composable microservices. Many large-scale web companies have migrated over time to this architecture – and for good reason. But, as with any powerful technique, microservices come with their own brand of tradeoffs, and it is important to be aware of them before deciding whether they are appropriate in any particular case. They are not for every scale of problem, for every stage of company, or for every team.

This session takes a pragmatic approach to microservices, and compares them to the alternatives at different stages of company evolution. Using examples from Google, eBay, and Stitch Fix, as well as from smaller organizations, it makes practical suggestions about whether, when, and how an organization should consider adopting a microservices architecture. Assuming microservices are the appropriate choice, it outlines an experience-based, incremental approach to making a successful re-architecture to microservices.

Dana Scheider

Dana Scheider will speak about executive dysfunction, a set of cognitive/psychological conditions that affect the brain's planning and organization functions. These conditions affect a lot of neurodivergent folks and a lot of people who have them don't even know what they are. The talk discusses what executive dysfunction is and how to deal with these conditions as an affected individual or someone who has to work with one.

Senior Rubyists AMA (tech, careers, "people stuff", whatever)

In lieu of a formal presentation, this month we're having a panel of senior Rubyists available to answer your questions! What kind of questions, you ask? GREAT QUESTION! This is an "Ask Me Anything" session, so as long as you stay within the bounds of our Code of Conduct, you can ask us... well, anything! OO design, job hunting etiquette, stupid Ruby tricks, Japanese calligraphy, gaming, baking, 3D printing... anything! (We may not actually be able to answer baking questions, though.)

The AMA starts right after the 7pm announcements and ends when we run out of questions or panelists!

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

AMA 7pm-9pm

After presentations we'll have more socializing time. 

Check Calagator for more info.

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

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-9pm

After presentations we'll have more socializing time. 

Check Calagator for more info.

We'll have pizza & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations. THERE WILL ALSO BE CUPCAKES. This month's meeting is on the 27th floor.

PRESENTATIONS at 7pm

Main Presentation by Ruby Hero Coraline Ada Ehmke: "Metaphors are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors."

Making a special trip from her hometown of Chicago, Coraline is our very special 15th anniversary guest! She'll be giving us a special treat: her well-received keynote from Rubyfuza! Here's the abstract:

Language matters more than you think. And the more you think, the more you need language. This talk explores the connections between language and problem solving, how the metaphors that we use can expand or constrain our thinking, and how it all relates to our identities as software developers and as human beings. Along the way we'll learn about linguistics, category theory, Russian colors, gigantic bridges in France, and how to pronounce the word "lacuna". And you'll definitely have some things to think about. Hopefully, in new ways.

Thanks to New Relic for providing the venue and beer, pizza & snacks this month! And EXTRA SPECIAL thanks to New Relic for sponsoring Coraline's trip to come hang out with us!

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 5th 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 27th 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!

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

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-9pm

After presentations we'll have more socializing time. 

Check Calagator for more info.

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

PRESENTATIONS 7pm-9pm

After presentations we'll have more socializing time. 

Check Calagator for more info.

We'll have pizza & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations. This month's meeting is on the 27th floor.

LIVE CODING at 7pm

Main Event: LIVE PAIR PROGRAMMING with Lauren Voswinkel and Sam Livingston-Gray

In lieu of a formal presentation this month, we'll have two veteran Ruby developers throw a terminal session up on the big screen and try like heck not to make complete fools of themselves!

Lauren Voswinkel: Conway's Game of Life Code Retreat.

Assuming we're not having too much fun with the live coding, we'll take 30-45 minutes to work on Conway's Game of Life. Pair programming is highly encouraged, but is not required. We'll take some time to talk about what we learned during the exercise, as well as what approaches worked and what didn't. The whole idea of this exercise is to have a space and time to actively practice coding.

Please Bring Your Laptops

After the madness, 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 5th 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 27th 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!

We'll have pizza & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations. This month's meeting is on the 27th floor.

PRESENTATIONS at 7pm

Main Presentation: "A Beginner's Guide to Open Source" by Dana Scheider

Dana joined the Cucumber core team last year (yay Cucumber!), and wants to share some of what she's learned as an OSS maintainer. This talk is aimed at people who are hoping to get their toes wet in OSS, but are not sure how to get started.

Lauren Voswinkel: Conway's Game of Life Code Retreat.

"We'll take 30-45 minutes to work on Conway's Game of Life. Pair programming is highly encouraged, but is not required. We'll take some time to talk about what we learned during the exercise, as well as what approaches worked and what didn't. The whole idea of this exercise is to have a space and time to actively practice coding."

Please Bring Your Laptops

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 5th 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 27th 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!

We'll have pizza & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations. This month's meeting is on the 27th floor.

PRESENTATIONS at 7pm

Tim Wade: What we talk about when we talk about unit testing

If you're new to coding you may find TDD one of the harder things to learn when all you want to do is get your hands dirty and write some code. As you grow this may be further compounded by the fact that no one seems to agree on (or even know) what unit testing is. Like me, you might read up on it, but find it hard to apply the principles you learned in your favorite web framework, which seems to have some ideas of its own. In this talk, I'll compare some common points of view on what we might mean by unit and integration testing, and why we might want to embrace these differences to keep a flexible approach to what we're testing.

Lauren Voswinkel: Conway's Game of Life Code Retreat.

"We'll take 30-45 minutes to work on Conway's Game of Life. Pair programming is highly encouraged, but is not required. We'll take some time to talk about what we learned during the exercise, as well as what approaches worked and what didn't. The whole idea of this exercise is to have a space and time to actively practice coding."

Please Bring Your Laptops

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 5th 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 27th 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!

We'll have pizza & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations. This month's meeting is on the 5th floor.

PRESENTATIONS at 7pm

Small Talks

Is there something that has piqued your interest, gotten your goat, or filled your inner-child with wonderment lately? Please share it with us as we do some informal (any length from 30 sec to 10 min) talks. Could be about code, but could be about anything really. So come and share!

Lauren Voswinkel: Conway's Game of Life Code Retreat.

"We'll take 30-45 minutes to work on Conway's Game of Life. Pair programming is highly encouraged, but is not required. We'll take some time to talk about what we learned during the exercise, as well as what approaches worked and what didn't. The whole idea of this exercise is to have a space and time to actively practice coding."

Please Bring Your Laptops

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 5th 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 5th 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!

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

Josh Tompkins: Dependency Injection in Ruby

A short discussion of dependency injection and inversion of control in Ruby - what it is, how it fits into your Ruby code, and answers to some common objections, plus an intro to a Ruby gem to help bring DI to your projects.

Lauren Voswinkel: Conway's Game of Life Code Retreat.

"We'll take 30-45 minutes to work on Conway's Game of Life. Pair programming is highly encouraged, but is not required. We'll take some time to talk about what we learned during the exercise, as well as what approaches worked and what didn't. The whole idea of this exercise is to have a space and time to actively practice coding."

Please Bring Your Laptops

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 27th 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 27th 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!

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

JWTs have Trust Issues

by Lance Ivy

If application security is built on healthy distrust, then JSON Web Tokens are pretty healthy little tokens. Come learn about JWTs: why do they exist, what issues do they solve, and how do they compare to Rails sessions? We'll build a threat model for user sessions, develop an appreciation for open standards, and discover how JWTs can be useful in any Rails application.

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 27th 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 27th 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!

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

Jason Clark, Programming in the Small: Kids, Chickens, and Ruby After several years of programming in Ruby using Shoes, my daughter and I were hunting for a new project. Something more useful than a game. Something with a real-world connection. Then it struck us: Chickens! Join us as we show you how we built our coop monitoring system. It’ll be a wild ride of hardware hacking, weather-proofing, and father-daughter bonding, with Ruby sprinkled throughout. You’ll learn how to modernize your surroundings, and about engaging the young people in your life in technology along the way.

Lauren Voswinkel will round off this months meetup with a code-retreat exercise.

"We'll take 30-45 minutes to work on Conway's Game of Life. Pair programming is highly encouraged, but is not required. This month is our second month, as such, there will be restrictions put in place to force us to think about our code and our designs more in depth. We'll take some time to talk about what we learned during the exercise, as well as what approaches worked and what didn't. The whole idea of this exercise is to have a space and time to actively practice coding."

Please Bring Your Laptops

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!

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

How do you get from cat to dog? Ryan Wise will talk about his project that:

"illustrates breadth-first search and A* search in Ruby and solves the following example problem: Find the fewest edits it takes to transform one word into another with all intermediate words being found in a dictionary. E.g., a shortest transformation from "cat" to "dog" could look like this: cat--> cot--> dot--> dog. Note that each step represents one edit (one letter changed, added, or subtracted) and that each edit lands us on another dictionary word. This pattern continues until the target word is found."

Lauren Voswinkel will round off this months meetup with a code-retreat exercise.

"We'll take 30-45 minutes to work on Conway's Game of Life. Pair programming is highly encouraged, but is not required. This month we will just be talking about the problem and getting a feel for the problem set. In subsequent months, we'll be doing the same exercise, however, there will be restrictions put in place to force us to think about our code and our designs more in depth. After each coding exercise, we'll take some time to talk about what we learned during the exercise, as well as what approaches worked and what didn't. The whole idea of this exercise is to have a space and time to actively practice coding."

Please Bring Your Laptops

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!

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

This month we're doing something a little different!

We're going to have a panel of senior Ruby developers who will answer any questions relating to Ruby, getting into tech, things to focus on to amp up your Ruby career, or whatever else (that's relevant...) that may come to your mind. As such, we definitely recommend coming Tuesday if you're new to the tech community. Even if you're not new, there's still always new things to learn and ask.

The Senior Panel includes:

• Brent Miller - 11 years as a Ruby developer, Principal Architect & Engineer @ New Relic
• Sam Livingston-Gray - 10 years as a Ruby developer, Senior Engineer @ RealGeeks.com, Part of the Ruby Rogues podcast
• Jesse Cooke - 9 years, Team Lead at InQuicker/Stericycle, contributor to Rubinius, Maglev and JRuby

We have a new regular emcee, Lauren Voswinkel. Lauren adds, "I have a bit of an announcement and a primer about an ongoing activity that I'd like to start running regularly at meetings."

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!

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team). We are still looking for speakers, so if you're interested, visit testrubypdx.org/speak for details and suggested topics!