RubyJax

• who: Big Tiger
• where: Navigator Coffee Squadron, 7643 Gate Pkwy, Jacksonville, FL 32256 (904) 928-0048
• when: Tuesday, January 20, 7-9pm
• what: ThinkingSphinx – Intro to Full-text and Geospatial Searching

Tired of rolling your own search? Want to define what data is indexed in your ActiveRecord models? What if you could get all of this AND be able to search by geographical information for next to nothing? Look no further, we will be covering basic ThinkingSphinx setup through a full location based search. You’ll see step by step how to set up and execute full-text searching while you drink beer and eat pizza courtesy of Hashrocket.

The next meeting is this Wed. 12/10. See this for the deets. (And yes I did just type “deets.”) (I know I’m a dufus.) (Yes, I am OK with it.)

Our next meeting will be a joint venture between RubyJax and RefreshJax.

Tom Rossi of The Mole Hill will be speaking about his business, success and the challenges they’ve faced and still face. How he and his partner Kevin Finn work together, make decisions and he will reveal the secrets you need to become an internet millionaire almost over night.

The meeting will take place on Wed. Dec. 10th at 7:00pm at Navigator Coffee Squadron, 7643 Gate Pkwy, Jacksonville, FL 32256 (904) 928-0048 map

Pizza and Beers will be generously donated by Hashrocket, so be sure to invite your homeless friends.

Go read this

• Who: General discussion
• What: RubyConf wrap up
• When: Wed 11/12 at 7:00 PM
• Where: Navigator Coffee Squadron, 7643 Gate Pkwy, Jacksonville, FL 32256 (904) 928-0048 map

Here are the slides from Will’s talk last night.

• Who: Will Reed
• What: Website Performance Tips and Tricks
• When: Wed 10/29 at 7:00 PM
• Where: Navigator Coffee Squadron, 7643 Gate Pkwy, Jacksonville, FL 32256 (904) 928-0048

We will be having a meeting in September. The meeting will be on Tues. 9/30 (the last possible date to have a September meeting). The meeting will be at Navigator Coffee Squadron on Gate (see the previous posts for map). The meeting will be at 7:00PM. The meeting will last for two hours (or so). The meeting will showcase a presentation by our own L4rk. He will talk about stuff. This stuff will likely include stuff about Selenium testing with Rails. Should be good stuff. If you do not attend the meeting you will miss the meeting.

See you there. And remember, l4rk loves you. _{(and so does Big Tiger)}

Testing as Communication, Real-World Techniques

• who: Jon “Lark” Larkowski
• where: Navigator Coffee Squadron, 7643 Gate Pkwy, Jacksonville, FL 32256 (904) 928-0048
• when: Tuesday, September 30, 7-9pm

This session covers how Hashrocket, an experienced Ruby on Rails consultancy, uses a wide range of real-world testing techniques and agile methodologies every day to satisfy client customer requirements. It will describe the life cycle of our testing workflow, from story capture to customer acceptance. This includes an overview of: fine-grained requirements gathering in “user story” form; how we manage stories and communicate transparently with the client using a web-based tracking tool; how story-driven development is expressed as test-driven development; and, how we enhance client/developer communication by writing plain-text tests in the vocabulary of the customer’s domain. In this session, you will learn how to turn natural-language requirements into running code that both customer and developer alike can communicate around; how to express customer requirements at the appropriate levels of abstraction, from high-level integration tests all the way down to granular unit tests; and, how to properly employ the latest tools, such as RSpec, StoryRunner, Selenium, Webrat, and fixture factories.

Brian Dainton of FiveRuns will be presenting at the next RubyJax. He will be talking about “Working with XMPP in Ruby.” He’ll also be talking a bit about working at FiveRuns, the tools they use, the problems they’ve overcome and scaling a big app.

Brian is a special guest star and is flying to Jax from Texas just to visit with us. He spoke at RailsConf and is one of the top Rails folks in the country. This is one meeting not to miss!

The meeting will take place on Thursday Aug 21 at the Navigator Coffee Squadron (which used to be called Sipper’s) at 7:00 PM.

7643 Gate Pkwy
Jacksonville, FL 32256
(904) 928-0048
map

• RubyJax is BYOB (even at Navigator).
• Coffee, Tea, Smoothies, pastries, bagels, muffins and stuff will be available for purchase. Please support Navigator, they are not charging us and are staying open just for us, so please buy something.

The next meeting will take place on Thursday Aug 21 at the Navigator Coffee Squadron (which used to be called Sipper’s) at 7:00 PM.

7643 Gate Pkwy
Jacksonville, FL 32256
(904) 928-0048
map

• The topic hasn’t been set yet.
• RubyJax is BYOB (even at Navigator).
• Coffee, Tea, Smoothies, pastries, bagels, muffins and stuff will be available for purchase. Please support Navigator, they are not charging us and are staying open just for us, so please buy something.

This year Jax Code Camp has been expanded beyond the .NET conference it’s been. It will include other languages and technologies like Ruby, Python, PHP and Java.

Although this is a free conference space is limited, so please and sign up. Also speakers are invited to submit a proposal talk or several. I would like nothing more than to show the Jax tech community how strong we Ruby folks are! This is gonna be a great conference!

To contrast all the Textmate goodness that will be going on tomorrow night, Tim Pope will be talking about Vim. He will be sharing the vim_love with everyone because that’s what he’s got: VIM-LOVE for EVERYONE. That’s V-I-M—L-O-V-E. Which is comes from T-I-M-S-V-I-M-L-O-V-E.

(Tim asked me to write this post just like this) (No he didn’t) (“Tim Pope did not approve this message”)

Go here for the address and time and stuff.

The topic will be a group discussion/demonstration of Textmate tips and shortcuts. If time allows it will be followed by a group discussion/demonstration of plugins and testing tips. If time allows will will have a group discussion/demonstration about stories of unsatisfying encounters with prostitutes.

The next meeting will be July 17th at 7:00 PM back at Avality (7406 Fullerton St, Jax, FL, 32256), which is right across the street from the Avenues Mall.

We still don’t have a topic or a speaker so if you’d like to give a talk let me know. Tiger suggested doing lightning talks where a few people can present for ten to twenty minutes each. If you want to give a lighting talk, let me know. If we don’t get anyone to volunteer then I will try my best to entertain by either juggling bricks, stories of unsatisfying encounters with prostitutes or showing some Textmate tricks.

This Thursday (July 3rd, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm) Alan Doucette will be talking about Cloud Computing. You can read all about it on the Refresh Jax site.

If you are looking for something to do Thursday night, come by. And remember Refresh is always BYOB (bring your own beer) and BBFS (bring beer for steve).