For January, the normal "7 PM presentation + beer afterward" meetup is being replaced with the following event, which Gerald Bauer and Scott Patten are organizing and which I (Peter Armstrong) among others will be speaking at. (They are still taking proposals, so submit one!)

Here's the description of the event that Scott sent me...

What:
RubyCamp 2008 (http://rubycamp.wordpress.com). RubyCamp is a free one-day gathering for Rubyists and Railers.

When and Where:
WorkSpace in downtown Vancouver, B.C., Canada
January 26th, 2008 from 9:00 to 5:00

Who should come:
Anyone who's interested in Ruby and Rails, whether you're just interested in learning what this Ruby thing is all about or you know Ruby inside out.

The Conference Track:
A conference-style track with "classic" talks on Ruby or Rails topics. We're looking for a few more speakers, so see http://rubycamp.wordpress.com/about/#talks if you're interested in giving a talk.

The Hackathon Track:
An informal un-conference track focusing on hacking some Ruby code, showing off a cool feature you just added to your Rails application or demonstrating a new addition to Rails 2.0. If you're interested in working on some code or showing off something, get started by promoting your ideas and getting some buzz going: http://rubycamp.wordpress.com/about/#hackathon .

A weekend of Ruby:
There are two more reasons to come to Vancouver for those of you who are out of town.

On the Friday before RubyCamp, Rails Advance is giving a one day intermediate Ruby and Rails workshop; see http://railsadvance.com/workshop for details.

On the Sunday after RubyCamp, Peter Armstrong is giving a one day workshop on using Flex and Rails; see http://www.flexiblerails.com/workshops for details.

About Vancouver:
Vancouver is located in Beautiful British Columbia on Canada's west coast. While you're in the 2010 Winter Olympics City take advantage of the great snowboarding and skiing in nearby Whistler/Blackcomb or Cypress Cypress Mountain. http://rubycamp.wordpress.com/about/#vancouver

For more information, see http://rubycamp.wordpress.com

See you all at RubyCamp in Vancouver.

This is being changed to November 6 to accommodate the speaker's schedule. Also, the location is The Network Hub.

We have a great and very timely talk this month:

Title: Facebook on Rails

Speaker: Matthew Chiu

Description:
"I would like to offer a quick talk on the Facebook platform and the challenges of
using rails to develop Facebook apps. I have been working on an app which is Facebook Native rather than an IFrame app, and based on my experiences. I will discuss the pros and cons of using a proprietary markup language vs. web standards like HTML and javascript.

My talk will also focus on the RFacebook library and some of its shortcomings. I will give examples of how RFacebook could be extended to meet developer's needs and also talk about bugs in RFacebook, which haven't been patched in the main release."

Bio of Matthew Chiu:
"I am a software developer and entreprenuer who is currently focused on doing social networking apps. Previously I have held software development positions with Oracle, Samsung and a number of startups. I hold degrees in computer science from Cornell and Stanford."

I also have some free books from O'Reilly to give away, so if you needed another reason to come, now you have one...

I apologize for the extremely late notice of the date change. Note also that we are going back to The Network Hub: Thanks very much to Minna at The Network Hub for agreeing to host us. After the talk many of us will be heading to Steamworks, so if you are really late and we have already left The Network Hub, we'll be there...

We have two great talks this month!
1. DSLs in Ruby (Scott Patten, 15-20 min)
2. Developing Facebook Apps (Paul Prescod + Vince Hodges, 40-45 min)

After the talks, beer at Steamworks will definitely be in order. Since the meetup starts at 7, I assume we'll get to Steamworks at about 8:30. The talk details are below...

1. DSLs in Ruby (Scott Patten)
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Talk description:
"Domain Specific Language" means different things to different people. In this talk, Scott will be describing how DSLs in Ruby allow you to program closer to the problem domain, making your code more concise and readable. Specifically, Scott will be describing how he used Ruby to create a Domain Specific Language to interface between Ruby and the Ploticus graphing package. The actual code for a stripped down DSL is only ~60 lines long, so there will be ample time to go through the implementation in detail.

Bio:
Scott is a physicist who found himself spending more and more time coding and less and less time in the lab. Scott also started programming web apps in Ruby on Rails in his spare time. Finally, he gave in to the inevitable, cut himself loose from his job, and started looking at ways to get paid to do Ruby and Rails work.

Currently, Scott is working full time on a scientific graphing web application called Plot-O-Matic (www.plotomatic.com), written in Ruby on Rails. It's in beta, so the 'working' part has been achieved, but the 'getting paid' part is still pending.

2. Developing Facebook Apps (Paul Prescod + Vince Hodges)
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Abstract:
Facebook is one of the fastest growing applications in the Web's history. Deploying applications within the Facebook environment has some great advantages. First, you can have a pretty good idea of the demographic of your audience. Second, the environment is extremely viral. Third, you can take make interesting applications that take advantage of all of the delicious data in the user's profile -- especially their list of friends.

Bio:
Vince Hodges is a senior software developer and has worked on a variety of projects and industries over the past 17 years including financial services, telephony, peer 2 peer music sharing and most recently as an entrepreneur with his own startup developing consumer web applications. Today, Vince is a senior developer working on Kinzin.

Paul Prescod is director of application development at Kinzin. Paul is co-author of the XML Handbook, author of numerous articles on XML and REST and contributor to open source XML tools and open standards.

Kinzin is an online gathering place for families to privately share photos, stories, and recipes as well as plan family events.

Schedule note:
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I'm tentatively thinking of moving the meetup to the second Tuesday of every month, since the Python user group is on the first Tuesday of every month. We can discuss the best time for everyone at this meetup or in email (if you can't get to the meetup because of the schedule, you won't be there to discuss it!). I still need to confirm the availability of the space and work out one possible scheduling conflict, so this meetup may move from September 11 to a different day. I'll know fairly soon and update the description accordingly...