New Hampshire Ruby Users Group - Home

March 2010 Meetup

2010-03-10T01:08:00Z

Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) this coming Monday, 15 March 2010 at 7pm for the March edition of NHRuby. This month our host with the most, Tim Golden (Technology Director at RMC Research), is leading a hands-on session on setting up Ruby on Windows.

Windows has long been an "also ran" in the Ruby community... but no more! With a proper setup, Windows is a robust and stable platform for Ruby development and Tim will guide us through a live install of Ruby, Rubygems, and some popular gems. In addition, Windows IDEs (integrated development environments) will be covered. Wrapping up, we'll put our new Ruby environment to the test developing a simple Rails application.

Tim will be providing CDs of all packages needed to get up and running, so bring your Windows boxes and get setup with Ruby!

February 2010 Meeting Recap

2010-02-16T14:34:00Z

Thank you to all that came out for the first (by snow delay) meeting of NHRuby in 2010. We had good turnout for the meeting and a great time post-meeting closing the Portsmouth Brewing Company.

The the first half of the evening was a presentation by Brian Turnbull on Object Oriented Design in Ruby.

OOP Intro in Ruby for NHRuby Feb 2010

View more presentations from bturnbull.

For the second half of the meeting, we split into groups based on experience and prior exposure to Ruby. One group took on the programming exercise based on the presentation to create a class representation of a sliding tile puzzle. The second group rose to the challenge of writing a solver for sliding tile puzzles. And finally, Brian Turnbull lead a group through the Ruby idioms and conventions in the sliding tile puzzle implementation used by the challenger coders.

Thank you again for a great NHRuby meeting. Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday, 15 March 2010 with topics to be announced.

Railscamp New England

2010-02-16T00:33:00Z

Ted plugged the upcoming Railscamp NE event earlier tonight. So I thought I’d post some more information in case anyone is interested. I would strongly recommend attending if you’re able to. This was probably the single best tech event I attended last year. For serious.

Where: West Greenwich, RI (W. Alton Jones Campus)
When: March 12 – 15, 2010
Cost: $150
railscamps.com | sign up

Arrive Friday evening, leaving Monday morning (or anywhere in-between). The $150 price includes lunch and dinner for Saturday and Sunday. Those will allergies or special dietary needs can be accommodated.

Housing is provided on campus, there are small lodges with single beds. Spouses and significant others are encouraged to attend. We have some limited capacity for private rooms this time, so first come first serve on the private rooms. (couples only)

You must bring your own pillows and sheets
You must bring your own toiletries
You must bring your own towels

Intranet Wifi will be available throughout the camp, with no access to the outside internet. We hope to encourage people to seek out other developers and start a dialogue to get things done. No formal format as a regular conference, if you have material you wish to present you can do so, gather people and present and get feedback.

We should probably have an image of Gemcutter running locally, hopefully an image of Rdoc.info and Bannajour as well as the local Twitter client.

All skill levels are welcome and encouraged to attend. If you’re just learning it is a great opportunity to learn from others and make friends with many other great Ruby developers. If you’ve been hacking away for years it is a great chance to participate in what will basically be a 3 day hackfest.

Aside from just hacking there will be plenty of fun going on. Last year we had pretty epic RockBand-a-thons going on. On either Saturday or Sunday (we’ll probably pick the day with the best weather) there will be a 5k run on the campus property. (either a road race or on any of the many paths in the woods) Drinking, bon fires, s’mores, Werewolf, Urban Terror LAN-parties and more.

Local Events Calendar

2010-02-16T00:13:00Z

Living in the greater seacoast NH area and looking for other geeky events to attend? We are legion! Leslie Poston has put together a calendar of local NH tweetups, meetups, seminars and events you might be interested in. Check it out and see what else NH has to offer (ical link).

February 2010 Meetup

2010-02-06T03:14:00Z

Join us at RMC Research (1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH) on Monday, 15 February 2010 at 7pm, for the postponed from January inaugural meeting of the 2010 NHRuby season. This year at NHRuby, we’re going to try something a little different. Mixed in with our usual presentations, we’ll be covering the fundamentals of Ruby beginning with Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

New Hampshire local, Brian Turnbull, will be leading a hands-on class covering the fundamentals of OOP (Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Dynamic Binding) with special emphasis on OOP in Ruby. We’ll cover the why and how of writing object oriented code in Ruby and touch on designing larger systems using OOP principles. In addition, if the stock Array type is not cutting it for you, we’ll cover creating your own types and learn what makes a complete class in Ruby. But wait! There’s more! It’s not all talk—we’ll finish the meeting with an application of what you learned though a programming exercise designed to flex those new OOP filled brain cells.

So if you have some programming background, but have been wondering what all this hubbub about objects is, join us. Or you want translate your OOP knowledge to Ruby, this is the meetup for you. If you are already fluent in OOP, you’re welcome and encouraged to help guide the session and assist other members… plus there will be an extra credit challenge in the form of a Ruby game during the programming exercise!

January 2010 Meetup Canceled

2010-01-18T16:34:00Z

We're canceling tonight's meeting.

The snow is letting up, however the roads are a mess and our host, RMC Research, has closed their offices for the day. The next NHRuby meeting will be Monday, 15 February 2010 — same topic, Object Oriented Programming.

January 2010 Meetup

2010-01-11T16:37:00Z

MEETUP CANCELED — Due to snowy weather and slippery roads.

Happy New Year!

Join us at RMC Research on Monday, 18 January 2010 at 7pm, for the inaugural meeting of the 2010 NHRuby season. This year at NHRuby, we're going to try something a little different. Mixed in with our usual presentations, we'll be covering the fundamentals of Ruby beginning with Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

New Hampshire local, Brian Turnbull, will be leading a hands-on class covering the fundamentals of OOP (Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Dynamic Binding) with special emphasis on OOP in Ruby. We'll cover the why and how of writing object oriented code in Ruby and touch on designing larger systems using OOP principles. In addition, if the stock Array type is not cutting it for you, we'll cover creating your own types and learn what makes a complete class in Ruby. But wait! There's more! It's not all talk -- we'll finish the meeting with an application of what you learned though a programming exercise designed to flex those new OOP filled brain cells.

So if you have some programming background, but have been wondering what all this hubbub about objects is, join us. Or you want translate your OOP knowledge to Ruby, this is the meetup for you. If you are already fluent in OOP, you're welcome and encouraged to help guide the session and assist other members... plus there will be an extra credit challenge in the form of a Ruby game during the programming exercise!

November 2009 Meeting Recap

2009-11-19T14:33:00Z

Thank you to all that came out for our last meeting of 2009. If you couldn't make it, check out the slide decks from Brian Turnbull's presentation (embedded below) on the Ruby Version Manager and Nick Plante's presentation on Amazon EC2 and Rubber. Finally, Ted Roche has an excellent writeup (as usual) of the November meeting.

RVM - NHRuby Nov 2009

View more documents from bturnbull.

With that, we draw a close to a great 2009 for NHRuby. Our next meeting is scheduled for Monday, 18 January 2010. See you in the new year!

November Meetup: EC2 and RVM

2009-11-08T01:15:00Z

NHRuby is meeting for the last time this year on Monday the 16th at 7pm at RMC Research, 1000 Market Street, Building 2, Portsmouth, NH. Monday?! You say? Yes — due to scheduling conflicts, the regular meeting day for NHRuby is now to the third Monday of the month. Also, since next month's meeting fell so close to the Christmas holiday, we decided to skip the December meetup and resume in January. So join us for the last meeting of 2009 for two presentations by NHRuby regulars, Nick Plante and Brian Turnbull.

Nick will present EC2, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 is a web service which allows customers to rent virtual server instances by the hour. The real power of EC2 is that it allows you to auto-scale your web applications on demand. Expecting heavy load today? Fire up another web app server or two, with no wait time for procurement, while taking advantage of Amazon's robust infrastructure.

Making EC2 even more attractive are tools like Matt Conway's Rubber, a set of extensions to Capistrano that allows you to script procurement and provisioning of server instances as well as deployment of your application itself. Need to set up a staging server? Use Rubber to deploy a disk image, install the necessary stack and utilities, and deploy the appropriate version of your application -- in moments -- all automatically. In this talk, Nick will quickly discuss the basics you need to know and then dive right into a realtime demo.

Brian will introduce RVM, the Ruby Version Manager. RVM is a command line tool which allows us to easily install, manage, and work with multiple Ruby environments and sets of gems. Topics to be covered include:

Installation of RVM on Linux or OS X.
Day to day use of RVM to switch between Ruby interpreters
Managing sets of gems using Named Gem Sets

If you've ever been burned by differences between development and production, you should check out RVM — see how easy it is to take control of your Ruby environment.

So join us on Monday, 16 November at RMC Research for the last meeting of the year. Hope to see you there!

Software Process and Cucumber Recap

2009-10-30T13:00:00Z

Thanks again to Dan Pickett for coming out last week and sharing his talk about software process and outside-in development with us. And thanks to everyone else who came out, too. If you missed out, make sure to check out the slide deck embedded below:

Solving Problems with Software

View more presentations from enlightsolutions.

And of course spend some time playing around with Cucumber, too. It’s good stuff.

As mentioned at the meetup, future NH.rb events will be switching to the third Monday of the month, due to schedule changes with RMC. We’ll be announcing the agenda for the November 16th meetup shortly, and will be skipping December since it falls so close to the holidays. ttys!

October Meetup: Software Process and Cucumber

2009-10-15T18:35:00Z

As mentioned on the email list, our October meeting will be held on the 22nd this month due to some scheduling conflicts. Join us at RMC Research at 7PM to hear our friend Dan Pickett of Enlight Solutions present his talk “From Wetware to Code – How’s Your Process?”

“We spend so much time focusing on conventional programming. Everyone focuses on standards, code clarity, testing, and what gems to use. Let’s chat about what’s done before your fingers hit the keys. Let’s talk about brainstorming, requirements, stakeholders, mock-ups, and writing solid user stories and acceptance tests with Cucumber. Every project has a story – how will your next one end?”

I can certainly say that Cucumber has changed the way that I approach software development, personally. This is sure to be a good talk, and something you don’t have to be a hardcore Ruby fanatic to get a lot out of either—the techniques and tools Dan will be talking about are useful to anyone doing software development on the web. Cucumber, for example, works great for Java, .NET, Flex or web applications written in any language. So tell your friends and coworkers, and we hope to see you on Thursday!

September Meetup: Ruby Games

2009-09-09T23:42:00Z

So Casey has been telling me how much fun our Portland-based comrades have been having with the RubyGames concept, so we’re gonna try that out this month in Portsmouth.

Wait. What? Games? Yup.

Ruby Games will test your programming and reasoning skills by presenting you with puzzle challenges to solve in code. I’ve already worked up one puzzle problem for the group (a word jumble problem), and Casey will be coming up with a second one. We’ll have people pair up to work on these, so don’t worry at all if you don’t have a lick of Ruby programming experience. In fact, I’d say that Ruby skills aren’t nearly as important as basic reasoning skills and inventiveness are.

Sounds good, right? But it gets better! By participating, you’ll learn (whether you like it or not) about: * Basic Ruby syntax—an engaging but simple introduction to language basics and an opportunity to do hands-on learning with your peers. * Test-Driven Development—you’ll be writing a solution, or an implementation, to a pre-defined spec we will supply. witness the power! * Pair programming—we’ll be pairing people up, because two heads are better than one (right?) * Algorithm runtime efficiency—once you’ve solved the problem, we’ll take a look at how fast your solutions run and compare approaches.

You’ll have fun. And you’ll learn something. It comes with a money-back guarantee. And free pizza, too. Mark your calendars for next Thursday September 17th at 7PM and join us at RMC Research in Portsmouth. I think it just might be the best NH.rb of the year.

August Meetup: The Rosa Restaurant

2009-08-13T15:01:00Z

We take a break from formal presentations this month to enjoy all the seacoast can offer. Please join us at The Rosa Restaurant (directions) starting at 7 PM on Thursday, August 20th for dinner, drinks and a Show ‘N Tell.

Admission to the meeting is simple: a 2-minute to 10-minute standup presentation. (Okay, you can sit if you want.) The theme is Learning Ruby and Rails and Computing. Bring along a book or magazine and tell us why it makes you a great guru (or novice) Ruby programmer. Tell us about how you’re learning or keeping up. Talk about a web site you use. The best place to keep up on Rails news. An RSS aggregator you use to keep track of a lot of sites. A site that offers good podcasts. What’s your favorite reference site or book? The best tutorials? Talk about an add-on you’ve tried that’s sweet.

Eat, drink, be merry, teach something, learn something.

We’ve reserved a function room that should easily hold 15, so there’s no need to RSVP.

Hope to see you there!

Railscamp and Summer Break!

2009-06-28T17:51:00Z

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!

Sphinx and Sass Recap

2009-06-27T17:51:00Z

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.

Solving the Riddle of Search: Using Sphinx with Rails

View more presentations from freelancing_god.

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!