RubyJax

The next meeting of RubyJax will be here soon, and in the spirit of the holiday season (Valentine’s), we would like to show some love. At the next meeting we will be doing pair programming. The idea is that we have some really experienced ruby/rails developers in the group and some really new ruby/rails developers. In an effort to lift the community we would like to pair a newer person (to ruby) with a more experienced person. The newer person can choose any topic they want and we will match them up with someone who knows that topic and they can spend an hour and a half together hacking and talking.

Here are a few ideas:

• Intro to Ruby
• Ruby Meta-programming
• Into to Rails
• Rails testing intro
• Rails testing with rspec
• Rails testing non-rspec
• Unit testing Ruby (w/o rails)
• Comparing Ruby to your language of choice
• Merb
• RJS
• Rails 2.0
• Hack on a your project (micro-volunteering anyone?)
• Anything you want

To help us coordinate a bit, please send me an email (steve {at} lesseverything [dot] com) and tell me:

• Which side of the pair you’d like to be on.
• What you would like to hack on.
• Do you have a preferred partner (only one luckey soul will get to pair with l4rk).
• If you will be bringing your laptop and what OS it is running.

Here is a list of experienced ruby/rails people to choose from (if you name is not listed here, please let me know and I will add it):

• Desi
• Lark
• Obie
• Steve

The next meeting of RubyJax will be held this Thursday evening at 7:00 PM (directions).

Obie Fernandez will be giving a talk about Advanced Active Record. Active Record is an ORM library used by Ruby on Rails and other ruby frameworks.

Obie’s talk may or may not cover the following Advanced Active Record topics:

• What is Active Record
• How to use find, and make your own custom finders.
• The secret difference between belongs_to and has_one.
• What exactly is has_many :through.
• How to make a double polymorphic association with STI on both sides.
• How make a triple polymorphic table.
• The polymorphic doppleganger pattern.
• Why Martin Folwer is considered the grand-father of Rails.
• The internals of Active Record.
• How to write your own adapter to your own files system database.
• The best way to refactor Active Record associations.
• What to say to Josh Susser to get him to give your patch a +1.
• How make session data available to your models.
• The proper use of with_scope.
• How to use alias_method_chain.
• And many more.

The Schedule for the meeting is as follows:

• 7:00 People start to arrive, mingle, get a drink
• 7:15 “Official” Start To Meeting
  • Next meeting announcement
  • News
• 7:20 Warm up topic: Liger and Steve will try to get people to talk and interact.
• 7:30 Intro For Obie
• 7:31 Headline Topic: Obie Fernandez “Advanced Active Record”
• 8:30 Close out meeting
  • Werewolf or something
• 8:50 Clean up
• 9:00 Leave.

The next meeting¹ will take place on Thru. Jan. 17. Watch this space for more details².

¹ Which will be called “January’s Meeting,” or “Jan’s Meeting” for short.

² Which will follow in the form of new blog posts.