2014 Meetings
Planner: Jeff Felchner @jfelchner
Emcee: Jeff Felchner @jfelchner
Beginner Talk: Clare Glinka - How to Make a Ruby Gem (aka The Things I Wish I'd Known Before Writing My First Gem)
Advanced Talk: Jeff Felchner - Using Rails Engines as an SOA Middle Ground
Food Sponsor: The Frontside
Socialization Practice Sponsor: OwnLocal
signup here -> https://github.com/austinonrails/members/wiki/February-2014-Lightning-List
Planner: Damon Clinkscales
Emcee: Damon Clinkscales
Beginner Talk: Lightning Round 1
Advanced Talk: Lightning Round 2
Food Sponsor: LoneStarRuby
Socialization Practice Sponsor: LoneStarRuby
PLEASE email sponsors -at- austin on rails -dot- org if you would like to be a premier sponsor! we need your help.
Planner: Chad Bailey
Emcee: Chad Bailey
Beginner Talk: Chad Bailey - Understanding (and Fixing) Rails App Performance on Heroku
Advanced Talk: Keith Gaddis - Monolithic SOA: Doing the right thing the wrong way (or was it the other way around?)
Food Sponsor: Heroku
Socialization Practice Sponsor: OwnLocal
Planner: Lance Woodson
Emcee: Jonathan Hardy
Beginner Talk: Patrick Morgan - Deconstructing your Code with Pry - Software is hard, but even more so if you don’t know what is actually going on. In this introductory talk, we will overview how to use the Pry REPL in the context of Ruby on Rails development and discover the ways we can explore code and program state while an application is running. Specifically we will overview the installation and use of Pry and a few of its more useful extensions in a Ruby 2.1 and Rails 4.x environment.
Advanced Talk: Lance Woodson - Fixing Foundations (Without Shaking the Walls) - A retrospective of work on a foundational element of PeopleAdmin’s technology stack — backgrounding with Resque. The problems were difficult to diagnose, manifesting mostly in production. The work would be risky, with the potential to cause outages across all applications. And the solutions required the building of tools not yet available. I will share my ideas in how to deal with these type of gnarly issues in light of this experience and demonstrate some of the tools developed by PeopleAdmin and released as open source gems that might help others dealing with chronic problems in their backgrounding layer.
Food Sponsor: PeopleAdmin
Socialization Practice Sponsor: PeopleAdmin
Planner: Theo Mills
Emcee: Theo Mills
Beginner Talk: Matt Swain - Unix Tricks for Rails Developers
Most Rails Developers use the Unix shell, Bash (or a variant), every day. However, many newcomers don't utilize the full potential of this ubiquitous command line interface to the Unix operating system. In this talk, I'll discuss powerful features and tricks of the Bash shell to help improve your day to day life developing with Rails!
Advanced Talk: Theo Mills - Refactoring Outside the Stack
For most large Rails applications, ActiveRecord models eventually become junk drawers full of callbacks, business logic and predicate methods. Using Code Climate’s “7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models” blog post as a guide, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of each recommended strategy, offering real world tips and code examples along the way.
Food Sponsor: ShippingEasy
Socialization Practice Sponsor: ShippingEasy
Planner: Damon Clinkscales
Emcee: Damon Clinkscales
Beginner Talk: MakerSquare Students & Teachers (3 talks)
Advanced Talk: Scott Feinberg @scottefein - Building a Geo-Distributed Infrastructure for your Rails App
Food Sponsor: WePay
Socialization Practice Sponsor: OwnLocal
Planner: Aaron Scruggs
Emcee: Aaron Scruggs
Beginner Talk: Khash Sajadi - Backgrounding
Advanced Talk: Joshua Cody - Arel for Software Writers and Computer Scientists
A relational algebra? Abstract syntax trees? The visitor pattern? There's a lot of neat patterns and computer science behind Arel, but it's also easy to write queries that make your coworkers go 
. What are the patterns and principles behind one of Rails' nicest tools, and how can we wield them tastefully?
Food Sponsor: AcademicWorks, inc.
Socialization Practice Sponsor: South by Southwest
Planner: Tim Tyrrell
Emcee: Nathan Ladd
Beginner Talk: Nathan Ladd - Better Testing By Questioning Everything
Advanced Talk: Nick Means - You are Not an Impostor
Food Sponsor: Cloud 66
Socialization Practice Sponsor: thoughtbot
Planner: Damon Clinkscales
Emcee: Anthony Lewis
Beginner Talk: Anthony Lewis - What's new in Rails 4.2
Advanced Talk: Michael May - Edge cache dynamic rails apps
Food Sponsor: Fastly
Socialization Practice Sponsor: OwnLocal
CANCELLED - due to Thanksgiving Holiday
Austin Area Holiday Web Bash - stay tuned for details!