Hey everyone,

This month we're doing "Bring a Problem Night". If you have problem that you can't solve, let's get the experts to take a look and come up with some ideas. Please send you problems as a reply to this email and hope to see you there!

- Allen Miller, Ed Allen, Will Sobel
The Organizers

Hey everyone,

Jon Seidel will be speaking on his experiences learning Rails and his new application he's developing to securely house password words and other information for users. He tell us about his opinions regarding rails and what he liked and did not.

We've got a last minute addition to the schedule...

Tom Atwood will give a brief summary of the W3C's new standard for representing semantic information in the Web: OWL, and then talk about a new DBMS for Rails based on OWL being developed in Oakland. The DBMS allows the Rails programmer to store instances of his Ruby classes directly, as Ruby objects, without forcing him to map them to/from relational tuples. It eliminates the need for the Rails Active-Record object-to-relational mapping library, and the need to drop into SQL when you get beyond the limits of the Active-Record database macros. The company (Data-Grid) is looking for alpha test users and feedback from the local Rails community.

Hope to see you there!

- Will Sobel
The Organizer

Hey everyone,

Here's the topic for the February meetup:

We've had a few requests to do a presentation on capistrano and deployment.

We've got the night all planned out!

Kelly Felkins will present some tricks and methods for securing and managing deployment using capistrano. He will be presenting what he's learned deploying around 5 to 6 small business sites with capistrano. Kelly's been working with capistrano before it was know as capistrano and it went by it's previous moniker, switchtower.

We've got Chad Woolly, whose in town from Tucson, is going to be talking about his experience with continous intergration and their use of capistrano. They've done some really clever things with capistrano. He'll talk on some tricks he's learned along the way and some best practices.

We've got our own native Berkeley resident Coda Hale who'll be speaking on deploying Rails in the large and how to answer the question, "can Rails scale? and can it be used for large, high traffic sites?"

Hope to see you there!
- Will Sobel

Since we are getting close to the holidays, I'm going to move the meetup up one week since a lot of people will be on vacation for the last two weeks.

We've got a double team of brilliant engineers who will demonstrate how to build a real-life application right before your eyes. No mirrors, no tricks, just real life coding like you've never seen before... Please give a big hand for Kelly Felkins and Jane Macfarlane.

Kelly and Jane are planning to create an application for suggesting and voting on East Bay Ruby Meetup topics. People will be able to login, view the list of suggested topics, vote on 1 or more topics, and add topics.

Does anyone have a spare projector they could lend to the meetup for the night?

Cheers,
- Will Sobel

BIOS:

Kelly Felkins
Kelly is the primary developer of four Rails applications, including 2 public sites. He started exploring rails in March 2005 and his first project went on line in May of 2005. He attended Pragmatic Studio's Ruby on Rails class in Pasadena in January. He is currently Director of Software Engineering at eBlock.net and is working on a future version of the company's spatial communications platform for neighborhoods.

Jane Macfarlane, PhD
Jane has developed one customer RoR application and is currently deploying a second. She has a background in Lisp and knowledge base development. She is the Chief Technology Officer of a startup that is developing a web product to provide customized exercise prescriptions to manage and maintain an individual's fitness and health. She is developing the knowledge base for the product in RoR.

For this meeting we will be allowing people who are new to Ruby and Rails to speak about something they discovered that was either surprising or difficult and how they solved their problem.

We will try to make this interactive and share ideas and solutions for developing in this environment. Presentations will be limited to 5-10 minutes followed by discussions.

There is a message board topic to share your ideas for presentations. Please add anything you're interested in presenting or would like to see presented.

The agenda so far:

1. Steven will be presenting a brief discussion on how routes and url_for work together and the scope for url_for. This is one of the most mysterious parts of rails and confuses many newbies.

2. Chris will do a brief presentation on meta-programming in Ruby. You've heard about it, you think you understand it... but hmmm... Here's a good chance to ask people what it's all about and get a brief intro.

3. Will's going to give a brief intro to the Ruby object model. We know what a class and an object are, but what exactly is a module and what's it good for? Also, what's an anonymous singleton class, and why can't it get a date?

4. Robert Vogel, who spoke last meeting on KD, will be giving a brief discussion of his experience releasing his first Ruby application to the world. We'll also be talking briefly on how to set up a open source Rails project.

Please keep the great suggestions coming...

Thanks,
- Will Sobel