Railscamp and Summer Break!
June 28th, 2009
Hey everybody! Just a quick note to let you know that we’ll be taking a break from the normal schedule in July, to give everyone a month off. Enjoy your summers and we’ll see you in August. In the meantime, if you’ve got a topic you’d like to talk about at the August meetup, definitely drop me a line.
I also wanted to remind everyone about Railscamp New England, which is happening relatively close by in the Bethel, Maine area, from July 17th – 20th. This is the very first North American Railscamp, and it’s being organized by our friends Pat Allan and Brian Cardarella (of Boston.rb). It’s going to be freeform and fun for both experienced Rubyists and beginners alike, is a great way to network with other kick-ass developers, and is an absolute bargain at only $120 for the entire weekend, including all food and lodging.
A couple of NH.rb folks have already signed up, but there are still some spots available. I hope we’ll see some of you there!
0 comments »Sphinx and Sass Recap
June 27th, 2009
Thanks to everyone who came out to the meeting last Thursday. In particular, a big thanks to John for hosting us in Tim’s absence and to Pat for bussing it up from his temporary home in Boston to present for us.
We had two presentations this month. First, Pat presented a modified version of his Railsconf talk on Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx, which generated some healthy discussion and great post-meetup feedback.
Casey was the second speaker of evening. He asked the group some philosophical questions about the nature of stylesheets, introduced folks to Sass, and then debuted his Sassijs library, which allows Sass to be rendered directly from JavaScript in the browser. He showed off a cool demo of this, and discussed how it might be useful to get designers working directly with Sass, thus removing obstacles to creating clean easily refactorable stylesheets. Casey’s slide deck is available on GitHub.
After the meeting we all headed to the Brewery for late dinner and drinks. See you next time!
0 comments »June Meetup: Sphinxy and Sassy
June 8th, 2009
We’re straying from the normal schedule again this month, but it’ll be worth it, I promise. We’ve got two great speakers lined up and lots to talk about. The meetup will be at the usual place on the fourth Thursday — June 25th @ 7PM.
The reason for the change? It’s two-fold; first, to accommodate special guest speaker Pat Allan, who is coming to us all the way from Australia (okay, he’s in Boston for the entire month, but that sure sounded good, right?) and also to avoid conflicting with the second Portsmouth tweetup event, which is being held on the 18th.
Pat will be presenting his popular Thinking Sphinx project, a Sphinx full-text search engine plugin for Rails. He’ll show us how to use them to add full-text database searching to your Rails applications.
Our other special guest for the evening is also traveling quite a distance to be with us — all the way from the frozen white tundra of Portland Maine. Yes, that’s right, our good friend Casey Rosenthal will finally be unveiling the awesome power of… SASSIJS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets + In + JavaScript)…
SASS was created to programatically build and organize CSS. Building on Ted Roche’s CSS presentation, Casey Rosenthal will review SASS syntax, and then open up the SASSIJS javascript library which renders *.sass templates client-side.
Leaving us a note in the blog comments or on the meetup group is strongly encouraged so we can plan to have refreshments enough for everyone. Hope to see you there!
0 comments »Monit & Lightening Talks Recap
May 22nd, 2009
May’s NH.rb meeting featured a great introduction / refresher on Monit courtesy of Brian Turnbull. Thanks Brian!
Our second speaker unfortunately canceled at the last moment due to an emergency, but we filled the time with lightning talks by Tim Golden, Nick Quaranto, and myself. Tim talked about his experiences getting a Ruby development environment set up on Windows. Nick Q demoed his WIP Gemcutter project for us (a Rubyforge killer!) and talked a bit about how they were using Metric Fu at ThoughtBot. I talked about RDoc, YARD, and demonstrated the RDoc.info / docs.github.com projects that I’d been working on.
Afterwards, a bunch of us headed over to the Portsmouth Brewery for drinks. Thanks everybody for coming out and we hope to see you all next month!
0 comments »May Meeting: Optimization & Monitoring
May 13th, 2009
Sorry about the delayed meeting announcement; I just returned from Railsconf and some southwest region exploration and had limited Internet access for awhile. But fear not! NH.rb is scheduled for the third Thursday of this month (May 21 7PM) at RMC as usual this month. The topics this month will be performance optimization (specifically for MySQL and Rails) and service monitoring.
First, David Berube will deliver his “High Performance Ruby on Rails and MySQL” talk, originally presented at MySQL Conference 2009 in April:
Database access in Ruby on Rails can be extremely slow, but it doesn’t have to be: this talk will discuss ways you can get massive performance speedups by increasing your query efficiency and by minimizing ActiveRecord object creation. This can keep your application scalable and responsible even under large datasets and modest hardware.
Brian Turnbull will then take us on a tour of Monit, and show us how to use it to manage production services. Monit is, of course, not just useful for Ruby tools but for all UN*X daemons and services, so make sure to spread the word to others you know who might be interested:
Monit is a flexible, open source utility for monitoring, reporting, and acting on processes, files, and servers to keep your deployed application healthy, secure, and running. This month, Brian Turnbull will share his real world experience installing, configuring, and running monit in production UN*X environments.
Thanks, we hope to see you all there!
0 comments »State Machines & Git Recap
May 1st, 2009
We had 14 people at the NH.rb meetup last night. Thanks to all of you for coming out, and for the lively post-presentation discussions over at the Portsmouth Brewery.
The first speaker of the night was Russ Jones, who presented on the state machine pattern. Russ specifically covered the pluginaweek/state_machine Rails plugin in his talk, but the concepts were applicable across the board:
After Russ wrapped up, Nick Quaranto testified on the awesomeness of the Git distributed version control system, and showed us some practical development workflows using it:
Both presentations were great. Ted Roche has also written up his own summary and reactions, if you want to read more. Our host, Tim (of RMC Research) was kind enough to broadcast the meeting via WebEx, where a few additional peeps joined us, and I’m told it was recorded too. Check the comments on this article, where Tim will hopefully post a link to the recorded session.
Meeting times and topics for the May event will be announced shortly (it’ll be on the regular date, 5/21). Hit me up if you’ve got something you’d like to present about.
1 comment »April Meeting: State Machines & Git
April 2nd, 2009
Holy crap! It’s April already. And that means that it’s time for me to announce the next NH.rb!
Please note that we’re deviating from the regular meeting time this month due to scheduling conflicts; therefore we’ll be doing the meetup on the fifth Thursday of the month (that is, April 30th) rather than the usual third Thursday.
Our first talk will be presented by our good pal Russ “CodeOfficer” Jones. Russ will be dishing on finite state machines; specifically he’ll be talking about when, where, and why you should use them in your model code, and the libraries you can use to get up and running with minimal effort:
State Machines are a useful design pattern in any language, and in Ruby they are super easy to implement. State_Machine and Acts_As_State_Machine (AASM) both help ease the pain of implementation and provide some amazing features.
In this presentation, I’ll cover some basic aspects of the pattern and talk a bit about both plugins. I’ll also demonstrate where state machines were useful in my own applications, and some of the cool things you can do with them.
Next, visiting Git scholar Nick Quaranto, the guy behind badass tips site Git Ready, will treat us to an overview to the Git version control system and review workflow strategies for effective use in your Ruby projects (or otherwise):
Learn the basics of using the Git distributed version control system, from the ground up to how you can integrate it into your own projects. We’ll go through the concepts behind the system, how some of the internals work, and an overview of commonly used commands. Finally, you’ll learn how you can use Git to collaborate with others, be it a team building a Rails project or publishing a RubyGem to the open source world.
So yeah, this is going to be a pretty good one. You’d be a fool to miss it. Srsly. Plus, Engine Yard will be providing pizza for us. Please leave a comment if you plan to attend; it helps us ballpark the amount of food to order. [directions to RMC]
5 comments »Sinatra & CSS Fundamentals Recap
March 20th, 2009
Thanks to everyone for coming out last night for the March meetup. It was great to see the usual suspects. And a few new faces, too!
As usual we had two topics to discuss. First, Ted Roche presented a review of CSS fundamentals, including an overview of the box model and element positioning — certainly something handy for those of us at all skill levels. You can find Ted’s slides at his website.
Afterwards, I took the stand to present the second topic of the night, speeding through a quick introduction to the Sinatra Ruby framework. We followed that up by live coding a simple user group prize chooser (source at GitHub).
A Quick Introduction to Sinatra (NH Ruby)
O’Reilly provided us with two books as meeting giveaways, which were rewarded using the livecoded Sinatra app :-). Thanks also to Tom Lee Jr and Andrew of Exeter-based DualStreet / Great Northern Products (a provider of Rails-based industrial e-commerce solutions) for providing refreshments. And of course to our host, Tim Golden and RMC Research, for providing the space and Webex goodness.
See you next month!
2 comments »March Meeting: Sinatra and CSS Fundamentals
March 3rd, 2009
Hello hello, and happy March. We’ve got two talks lined up for Thursday the 19th at RMC Research in Portsmouth (7:00PM, directions). First up, GNHLUG commander-in-chief Ted Roche will talk about CSS fundamentals:
We sometimes take for granted that the templates from our graphics designers just work and that the magick of the add-on JavaScript libraries just make whizzy graphic effects. That is, until something goes wrong, or a new browser renders funky pages, and you need to dig in and troubleshoot. That’s when you need to have a good handle on the fundamentals of CSS, and a good set of tools. In this session, Ted will review the basics of CSS, how the elements are combined, what ‘cascade’ refers to, and how to use CSS to specify layout using the CSS box model. He’ll finish up with some suggestions on tools to use and references for further study.
Cascading Style Sheets are a way to separate the content and structure of a web page from the stylistic elements. This allows:
- the style to be changed without changing the content
- better accessibility for folks with visual impairments
- better processing by search engines
- ease of maintenance by letting designers and content producers to work in parallel
Afterwards, Nick Plante (that’s me!) will deliver a practical introduction to Sinatra, the Ruby web microframework:
Sinatra provides a domain specific language (DSL) for creating RESTful Ruby-based web applications. If you’re used to Rails’ heavyweight approach to MVC, and think that it’s overkill for a certain class of minimalist web properties, you might be right. This is the sort of thing that Sinatra truly excels at, being lightweight and truly tiny. It’s also ORM agnostic and easy to manipulate, allowing developers to choose the tools that best suit them and their application. Standalone web service APIs, widgets, and micro-applications are all examples of things for which Sinatra might be a great fit.
In this presentation, I’ll give you a basic overview of the syntax you need to create useful Sinatra web apps, and will demonstrate how it can be used to create a Twitter-based keyword aggregator like Tweetdreams quickly and easily. We’ll also live-code a contest prize chooser that we’ll use at the end of the meeting to distribute some free swag provided by our friends at O’Reilly.
Hopefully we’ve got your interest peaked. Turnouts have been great lately, and this meeting in particular should have something for everyone — make sure to spread the word to others who might benefit from attending. Also, did I mention that there will be free stuff? And refreshments. Yup.
If you can’t join us in person, you can also participate from the comfort of your own home by using Webex. The meeting number is 687 881 114 and the password is ‘nhrb’.
1 comment »Ruby Gems, Jeweler, and a Rails 2.3 Preview
February 20th, 2009
Last night’s meeting was a lot of fun for me. I hope it was for the rest of you too (and everyone else who joined us online via WebEx!) It’s always nice to see all the familiar faces, and some new ones too this time around.
First, guest speaker Josh Nichols presented his work on Jeweler and an overview of publishing Ruby Gems:
After a short break, Brian Turnbull reviewed the new features available in Rails 2.3 (currently a release candidate, general availability soon), including a detailed look at Rails Metal and Rack.
If you enjoyed the presentations, I invite you to recommend Josh and Brian on WorkingWithRails. Thanks to everyone for coming out and hope you had a safe drive home! Who knew we were going to have a snowstorm, right?
1 comment »WebEx Meetup Info
February 13th, 2009
Thanks to the generosity of our host RMC Research and coordinator Tim Golden, you’ll be able to join us at the next meetup even if you’re nowhere near Portsmouth. This time around we’ll be trying out WebEx.
Below is information about joining the online meeting broadcast. Please test your system ahead of time. I believe anyone with Flash Player 6+ or QuickTime should be able to use it, but please post here if you’ve heard otherwise to let others know.
Meeting Information:- Date: Thursday, February 19, 2009
- Time: 6:45 pm, Eastern Standard Time (GMT -05:00, New York)
- Direct Link: Click here
- Meeting Number: 680 951 416
- Meeting Password: nhrb
- Call-in toll-free number Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239
Of course if you are in the southern NH area we’d still really like it if you could make a personal appearance ;-).
0 comments »February Meeting: Ruby Gems and Rails 2.3
February 12th, 2009
We’ve got two talks lined up for the February NH.rb gathering, which will be held on Thursday the 19th at 7PM at RMC Research in Portsmouth.
First, Josh Nichols, Boston.rb coordinator and Scotch advocate, will be presenting on Ruby Gems:
RubyGems are the packaging system used by Ruby to distribute libraries. What people forget is that it’s pretty easy to make and distribute your own gems. This talk will cover the basics of creating and managing a RubyGem using Rake and GitHub. Jeweler, a tool for automating these tasks, will also be covered.
Next up, hometown hero Brian Turnbull will give a presentation detailing the new features in Rails 2.3 (currently available as a release candidate) followed by an in-depth discussion of Rails Metal:
Built on the new Rack middleware in Rails 2.3, Metal forgoes the niceties of routing and ActionController in exchange for raw speed. Brian will demonstrate how to incorporate Rails Metal into a Rails 2.3 application, compare performance with the regular Rails stack, and discuss when to use and not use Rails Metal.
Refreshments will be provided (thanks to our friends at Engine Yard), and we also have some more great giveaways this month, courtesy of O’Reilly.
0 comments »ReviewRamp, Cucumber, and DynamicRecord
January 16th, 2009
The first NH.rb of the new year was a good one. Jonathan Linowes descended from his mountain retreat to deliver a trio of topics. Fourteen people attended in total, and a number of us headed over to the Portsmouth Brewery for drinks afterwards. Thanks to Jon for making the trek and to everyone else for the great conversation.
Broadcasting Live...
January 15th, 2009
Tim has set us up with Mogulus in order to live stream tonight’s presentation. If you can’t join us in person but still want to hear Jon’s talk, you can tune in to the Mogulus feed or click on the live section at the top of the page. If this works out well we’ll continue using it for future meetups. Hopefully it doesn’t start to impact attendance! :)
0 comments »January Meeting: Cucumber & DynamicRecord
December 26th, 2008
I’m pleased to announce the NHRuby January meeting, which will take place on Thursday, January 15th at RMC Research in Portsmouth (directions). Jonathan Linowes of Parkerhill Technology Group will be coming down from the mountains of Lyman, NH to speak to us about a tantalizing trinity of interesting topics:
- A demo of his pet project, ReviewRamp, presently in Beta. ReviewRamp is a SAAS (software as a service) application for collecting and reviewing on-line submissions such as business plans, conference paper proposals, and grant applications. Users create projects in ReviewRamp which have their own custom submission forms, review scoresheets, and summary reports. Implemented in Ruby on Rails.
- A review of how Jon is using Cucumber plain text stories for development and integration testing. Jon started using rSpec Story Runner over a year ago and recently migrated to the newer Cucumber implementation. Real examples from the ReviewRamp project.
- A presentation of DynamicRecord, a database engine Jon is developing for ReviewRamp. DynamicRecord extends the Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord (AR) object-relational mapping (ORM) module, enabling creation of dynamic attributes that look and behave like standard AR ones without the need to add tables or columns to the database.
Please note that the meeting date is actually the third Thursday of the month as opposed to the usual third Tuesday. We’re switching up the dates this year to prevent conflicts with certain regularly-scheduled Boston.rb events.
I’m really looking forward to Jon’s talk; it should be a good one. I’m sure there will also be some interesting conversation about the recently announced Merb / Rails merger. Hope to see everyone there!
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