WNY Ruby User Group

Details

Date: Tuesday, Oct 14th at 7:00 PM until 8:30 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Snacks and drinks will be available.

Topics

tbd

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Quick reminder, we’re meeting next Tuesday at 7:00 PM.

Addison-Wesley contacted me, and we’ve been given one free pass to Voices that Matter: Ruby 2008, a conference in Boston, MA that runs from Nov 17-20, 2008. The pass is a $795 dollar value, and will be given away in a lottery, so don’t miss out! This conference is being organized by Obie Fernandez, so it’s sure to be awesome.

They’ve also assigned us a group discount code, please let me know at the meeting if you’d like it - $200 off regular price admission.

See you there!

(see the original meet-up announcement for planned details)

Details

Date: Tuesday, September 23rd at 7:00 PM until 8:30 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Pizza will be available at 7:30.

If you’re interested in attending, and have any questions, please contact Jim Lindley

Topics

• Electronics and Microcontrollers
• Intro to jQuery (Javascript)
• Code Review

On a sad note, and partially explaining the poor planning of August’s meetings, we’ve lost one of our members, Luke Knowley, to cancer. A bad situation, best wishes to his family.

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Details

Date: Tuesday, August 12th at 7:00 PM until 8:30 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Pizza will be available at 7:30.

Topics

• Javascript and Rails
• Inject, Select, Detect, Reject
• Code Review

For the *ect methods, we have a homework git repository at http://github.com/kcbaird/wnyruby.com-homework/tree/master, which also has some information about the problem of Unification, which Mark will go into in greater detail. Just grab either of the spec files and go to town making your own implementations. Email Kevin at kbaird@academicmanagement.com with any questions.

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Details

Date: Tuesday, July 22nd at 7:00 PM until 8:30 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

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It was a good meeting. I (Kevin) spoke briefly about will_paginate, but the majority of the meeting was Mark Josef leading us through some ideas on the history of function calls from GOTO to more recent ideas like Ruby's method_missing, as well as some interesting variations on the Observer Design Pattern in Cocoa.

There was a talk by Patrick Farley at MountainWest RubyConf2008 on Ruby Internals (video at http://mtnwestrubyconf2008.confreaks.com/11farley.htm) that goes into detail on some similar topics in relation to Ruby.

The first chapter of Brad Ediger's Advanced Rails also goes into similar details about Ruby's implementation of method calls.

Both of these examples mainly deal with MRI (Matz' Ruby Interpreter), FYI.

Thanks, Mark.

The meeting on 7/8 was cancelled at the last minute due to various illnesses and scheduling conflicts.

We’ll be back on track shortly, and at the next meeting we’ll start to collect phone numbers and email addresses in case of emergency, should a meeting ever be cancelled again.

Sorry to all, and sorry especially for the unavoidable lack of notice.

Details

Date: Tuesday, July 8th at 7:00 PM until 8:30 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Sub tray will be ordered, please bring a couple bucks to chip in if you’re interested.

Kevin has posted the homework that he and Mark will be discussing at this meeting as a GitHub repository called WNYRuby.com-homework. Either clone it (if you know git), or just browse and look at the Spec files for the Looper problem and the Unification problem. Don’t grab the regular looper.rb and rev_moon.rb unless you want to see Kevin’s solutions to the problems.

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Details

Date: Tuesday, June 17th at 6:00 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Pizza will be ordered, please bring a couple bucks to chip in if you’re interested.

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For the past few months I have been attending meetings of the WNY Ruby User Group. My reason for attending was both job related and of a personal interest as part of that cliche 'lifelong pursuit of knowledge'.

I had been a member of only two 'programmers' groups prior to attending the WNY-RUG; I was a member the Buffalo State College Information Processors Association and an ancillary reader and commenter of evolt.org. Having only minor involvement in these organizations, I wasn't sure what to expect at the meet-ups for WNY-RUG.

I think many people, as I did, are picturing a group of high-level Ruby folks hanging out and speaking about things only high-level Ruby folks understand. And this was my first impression as well. As people presented, I thought I would have no point of reference at all.

However, as I persevered through the first meeting and went back to my notes, I realized there was benefit there for even people like myself (read: total ruby n00b). I found that there were three main things I gained from these meeting, and likely anyone with even the slightest interest or knowledge can glean from attending.

Resources

One of the biggest benefits I've had from attending is the people there. Each person there is interested in the language and spreading the knowledge of Ruby and Rails. Egos are tossed out and people can converse on a level that is stimulating and educational. After watching presentations I was able to interpolate what was being said about Ruby into what I was working on in my day-to-day work.

In conjunction with learning Ruby...

While going to group meet-ups I have been learning Ruby (on Rails). In comparison to other frameworks or languages, Ruby seems much more straightforward, but with the 'smarts' of other languages. While listening to other people present their information, I realized there were little pieces I was picking up as I was learning Ruby. The little bits I have been taking away from presentations have allowed me to better understand, if not on the level of other group members than on my own precursory level, the way things function in Ruby. This has been a nice in-road to the learning process.

Input

Not surprisingly, people who program in Ruby have the same problems any other people have. At the end of each meeting, when everyone who planned to present is finished, it seems the entire group engages in discussions that effect everyone who programs. It is a good feeling to be able to find common ground and understanding among peers regardless of platform or language.

At this point in time, I am not programming in Ruby day-to-day. As several members of the group have pointed out, all this will become easier once I do. In the meantime, I plan to continue learning and continue going to the meet-ups in order to benefit as much as possible from the group.

Details

Date: Tuesday, May 13th at 6:00 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Pizza will be ordered, please bring a couple bucks to chip in if you’re interested.

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Details

Date: Monday, April 8th at 6:00 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Pizza will be provided, please bring a couple bucks to chip in if you’re interested.

Agenda

(Add’l topics to be announced) Intro to ActiveRecord (Jim Lindley)

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  I raised a question in our last meeting about passing parameters into rake tasks. I was surprised that there wasn't an immediate answer to the problem and only a few references to it online.

   After messing around with some of my own tasks and taking some of the thoughts brought up in the meeting it turns out that this is quite simple and it appears it is also under utilized as there is quite a bit of experience in our group and it doesn't appear than anyone has tried it.

Simple example

  To pass parameters into rake tasks you simple append a key = value hash to the end of your rake command. So if you had a task foo in namespace bar and you wanted to pass in a variable called 'snafu' you call the following.

$>rake foo:bar snafu='situation normal all frakked up'

  The one caveat here is that obviously you have to have some knowledge of the parameter names used in the task. So your rake file would look something like this. Notice that your variables are accessed via the ENV hash.

namespace :foo do

  desc 'testing parameter passing'
  task :bar do

    puts "you passed in the parameter snafu = #{ENV['snafu']}"

  end

end

  So why would I want to do this in the first place? In my case I wrote a task to do some data related operations on 80K records and I wanted to be able to specify the number of or type of records on which to perform the task without having to write a different script for each instance or change the script itself for each run of the task.

Thoughts on multiple parameters

   It can get cumbersome if you have a task that needs several parameters. My current solution is to use to use a single params hash member and then parse out multiple values from it in the task. This has the added bonus of not requiring the person running the task to have to know anything about the names you've used inside your task they only need to be aware of the params hash.

$> rake foo:bar params=var1,var2,var3,var4

Note that you will need quotes around your params list if it contains any unescaped white space.

Details

Date: Monday, January 7th at 7:00 PM
Location: Academic Management Systems
1576 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY

Sessions

A few formal presentations will be given, topics include Capistrano (automated deployment tool), Ruby blocks and procs, and functional programming. There will also be opportunity for socializing and informal discussion. Our last meetup has a dozen participants, from several local companies.

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It’s out. See the release announcement on the Rails web log.

I felt that tonight was a very successful evening as it was very relaxed atmosphere and everyone appeared to have a good time. Jim gave a nice presentation about rSpec followed by a gory presentation by myself on Merb in which we only made it partway through.

Our next meeting is scheduled for: Monday January 7th, 2008 @ 19:00. We will hopefully have a new venu with less background noise and a more comfortable presentation environment. We hope to see you there!

Here are the slides that we covered from my presentation. I will post the rest when we cover them ( I don’t want to spoil all the fun! )

Merb Presentation – First part

If anyone has questions about anything discussed tonight or pertaining to Ruby in general please feel free to ask on the mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/wny_ruby .

Also if anyone has suggestions on how we can improve our meetings or what you would like to see covered at the meetings please mail the list or post comments here.

Thanks!

~Wayne