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.

This is not a formal process but, we are looking to fill a few slots for presentations in the coming months. Drop a note to the RubyJax Google Group or comment here.

Tentatively Scheduled Meeting Topics

• Flex on Rails by Russ Johnson
• Selenium Browser Testing Driven With RSpec Story Runner by Jon Larkowski
• ImageMagick/RMagick by Cayce Balara
• Ruby Best Practice Patterns by Rein Henrichs

What do you want?

There was some question as to whether or not anyone wanted to see the jQuery presentation Steven Bristol gave and it turned out to be very popular. What are you interested in seeing?

What is Your specialty?

Bert Hood is a HAML guy. He is keyed in to the HAML community and more like than not knows more than you. ;) His May RubyJax talk on HAML came off great and people gained valuable insight into what HAML is and where it is going.

As many of you already know the fine folks at Rails For All have put together a regional conference of all things Rails in Orlando, FL on February 8th & 9th, 2008.

I know what you’re thinking “Regional, huh? So the speakers probably suck right?”

Quite the contrary. The keynote speakers are fellow Floridians Obie Fernandez (author of The Rails Way) and Dan Benjamin (The Hivelogic guy whose blog you used to setup your mac to run rails)

There is a charity session featuring Evan Phoenix (of Rubinius fame) and Ezra Zygmuntowicz from EngineYard a premium rails host.

See who else is speaking and when on the conference schedule

This is shaping up to be a great conference nearly in our backyard. A healthy RubyJax turnout would be awesome. Perhaps some promotion T-shirts or pamphlets may be in order.

Speaking of promotion make sure and support the sponsors that make this conference possible. They are listed on the right-side of the conference homepage, including none other than LessAccounting from Steven Bristol’s LessEverything

Host

TeamGaia allowed us to use their studio. They are teens teaching teens how to make films about issues relevant to teens. Recently they were nominated for an Emmy, they lost out to a little production house named MTV (as in Video Killed the Radio Star). Special thanks to Shane for sticking around and running the A/V equipment.

Purpose

The purpose of this meeting was a meet and greet for local ruby/rails people.

Attendees

Jon Larkowski

Recently relocated from Madison, WI and living in Jax Beach. HashRocket Astronaut

Steven Bristol

Owner: Less Everything, their flagship product is Less Accounting

Corey Grusden

Divergent Software

Louis Kemp

Came from vb6 land

Tom Rossi

molehill – powerfully small software

Chris Chandler

Professional Rails developer for negative 1.5 weeks.

Obie Fernandez

Smalltalk => Java => Thoughtworks => Rails => CityCliq => HashRocket

Author: The Rails Way

Series Editor: Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series

Rob Warner

Blog

Wes Gibbs

Gestalt LLC

Chad Bearden

BearDen Designs

Suggested Micro-Volunteering application which has an analog in micro-lending.

Les Hill

RedLambda

Desi McAdam

DevChix

HashRocketeer

Kevin Finn

molehill – powerfully small software

tick – time tracking software

Phil Langeberg

Started programming through Welding school

Sandro Turriate

Django Evangelist

PostgreSQL Evangelist

Ben McDonald

No pickle

Blog

Koders

Jim “Big Tiger” Remsik

Official RubyJax Photographer

HashRocket Street Team Coordinator

Recordkeeper until he can pawn it off on to some unsuspecting soul …

External Links

Lighthouse – hosted issue tracking app implemented in Ruby on Rails, svn integration

Trac

RailsMachine – Rails host used by some RubyJax members

EngineYard – Premium Rails host, useful if you don’t want to have to administer your own server.