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January 2012

Planner: Keith Gaddis

Emcee: Keith Gaddis

Beginner Talk: Marcus Mateus, Backgrounding

Advanced Talk: Keith Gaddis, Lossless data with event sourcing

February 2012

Planner: Mason Hale

Emcee: Mason Hale

Beginner Talk: Demystifying ActiveRecord — Anthony Lewis

For many new Rails developers, their first exposure to Rails (and often Ruby) is through ActiveRecord and "magical" incantations like 'has_many' or 'belongs_to'. In this talk, we'll pull back the curtain on ActiveRecord and see what's going on under the hood. We won't assume any prior knowledge of Rails or ActiveRecord, but may skim over explaining methods and parameters which are already well documented elsewhere. Instead, we'll focus on the "big picture", identifying the main concepts and components and explaining how they fit together.

Anthony Lewis is an Internal Tools Developer at PeopleAdmin. Prior to that he was a freelance web developer and teacher.

Advanced Talk: Taming Complex Data Models — Mason Hale

The real-world is rife with complex relationships and arbitrary rules. As developers, we are often faced with the challenge of modeling and managing these complexities in our applications. In this talk, we'll delve into some of the "hairier" complex data-modeling scenarios like hierarchies, N-way relationships, and aggregated data and explore some of the patterns and techniques to tame these wild beasts.

Mason Hale is the founder and CTO of TeamTopia, the company behind SwimTopia, the world's friendliest swim team management solution. Mason was previously CTO at OneSpot and Chief Technologist at frog design. He has been working with Ruby on Rails since 2006.

March 2012

Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour!

April 2012

Austin on Rails RailsConf Happy Hour!

May 2012

Planner: Tim Tyrrell

Emcee: Tim Tyrrell

Beginner Talk: Rails as a Backend for Mobile Applications — Mike Bradford

Whether sharing or backing up custom data between users and devices or connecting to an existing web service, mobile apps commonly rely on web-based backends to extend their functionality. In this talk, we'll delve into the features Rails provides to build a RESTful API specifically for mobile apps, present some common techniques and best-practices, and point out some areas of caution.

Mike Bradford @mrmikebradford began programming in Rails in 2007 shortly after returning home from a PHP conference in Toronto. He has worked as a developer at UT Austin, Mumboe, and now Crossroads Systems, as well as iOS development at the company he runs on the side, 47 Primes. His app, TruthPacker, has been on sale in the App Store since January 2011. He can be found most weekends playing bass guitar at church or on Tuesday night jazz jam sessions at Kick Butt Coffee.

Advanced Talk: Intro to Backbone.js with Rails — Tim Tyrrell

Ruby on Rails is awesome, why should you care about Backbone.js? I will give an overview of why Rails developers should care about Javascript MVC frameworks and how you can easily integrate one into a Rails application. I will explain the structure of a Backbone.js application and how the paradigm jives with its Rails counterparts. You should be able to walk away from this presentation and add Backbone.js to your resume.

Tim Tyrrell @timtyrrell is a Chicago native fleeing the cold while working as a Rails Developer for PeopleAdmin in Austin, TX.

June 26, 2012

Planner: Mando Escamilla

Emcee: Mando Escamilla

Beginner Talk: LIGHTNING TALKS!!!!

Advanced Talk: MOAR LIGHTNING TALKS!!!!

July 24, 2012

Planner: Damon Clinkscales

Emcee: Damon Clinkscales

Beginner Talk: TBD

Advanced Talk: Steve Klabnik

August 28, 2012

Planner: Don Johnson

Emcee: Don Johnson

Talk 1: Digging Into Arel — Rob Mack

Rails 3 came with a major change to Active Record. The Rail team chose Arel as the foundation for SQL abstraction and relational functionality in Active Record. Earlier this year, Rob Mack dug into Arel and learned about how it works and what it can do.

Rob Mack (@robmack) is a Senior Rails Developer at Spiceworks. Before joining Spiceworks, he worked at PeopleAdmin, where he migrated their large-scale Rails application from Rails 2 to Rails 3 and built a configurable, extensible search tool that led him deep into Arel.

Talk 2: Into to Mongo & Mongoid — Don Johnson

Mongodb continues to gain traction in the industry as a popular alternative to traditional, SQL-based databases, and Mongoid is a popular ORM tool to work with Mongodb from Rails. Don will go over the basics of Mongo and using Mongoid to connect a Rails application to it.

Don Johnson (@djohnsonjr) is the Director of Engineering at Crushpath.

September 25, 2012

Planner: Lance Vaughn

Emcee: PJ Christie

Talk 1: Elasticsearch: Beyond the Railscasts — Scott Hamilton

Elasticsearch with the Tire Gem is an attractive search engine alternative to Solr/Sunspot and Sphinx/Thinking Sphinx. The Railscasts are a great primer and the documentation helps, but there are some gaps: how to include multiple models when building a json document for indexing, or how to create a custom analyzer for partial keyword matching. We'll walk through some real world uses of Elasticsearch and how to get more out of the Tire Gem for interfacing with Elasticsearch.

Links: Elasticsearch Website, Github, Railscast, Pro Railscast

Scott Hamilton is a Senior Rails Developer at CabForward. Scott started coding web apps for the corporate world with ASP.Net in 2004. Soon after he coded his first Rails app in 2009, Scott left the rat race for contracting opportunities with Rails. Scott is also learning iOS and is working on a CabForward project building an iOS MVP for a local startup. Scott will be assisting with the delivery of a series of Rails classes at Cospace beginning September 26th.

Talk 2: Pusher, Backbone, and Real-Time Rails Apps — Mike Abernethy

Looking to make your application a real-time, single-page Rails application? This can be done rather easily with a few tools, including Pusher, Backbone, and jQuery. See a quick look at how these tools come together to create a modern web application.

Mike Abernethy is a Senior JavaScript Developer at CabForward. He started coding in Java 14 years ago, JavaScript/jQuery 5 years ago, and Rails a mere 6 months ago. He's found that for fun and interesting work, Java is doomed and that Rails is the way to go. At CabForward he specializes in Backbone, jQuery, and real-time applications. Mike is also teaching an upcoming Backbone.js course at Cospace starting September 26th.

October 23, 2012

Planner: Damon Clinkscales

Emcee: Damon Clinkscales

Beginner Speaker/Talk: Lightning Talks from members

Advanced Speaker/Talk: Daniel Hedrick - HAML and Presenters!

Have you rolled your eyes every time the literati have prodded you to switch to HAML? Looked at its goofy syntax and thought, "What's the big deal?" Well, if you use a template language to present HTML view code and you cringe whenever you write bits of scripting in your views to check conditions, branch logic, and format information, then using HAML will make you a better programmer. But not unless you do it right. This presentation will give you the information and the strategy needed to build elegant, code-free views using HAML and the Presenter pattern.

Daniel Hedrick is a Senior Developer at Crushpath. He's been writing web applications for just almost 18 years. When he's not writing software, he enjoys having a pint of a good IPA, wrestling with his dogs, and watching sports. He's married and works hard to embarrass his children with his taste in music.

November 27, 2012

Planner: Richard Schneems

Emcee: Richard "The Thunder" Schneems

Beginner/Intermediate Speaker/Talk: David Kapp, Asynchronous Processing AND YOU!

At some point you'll encounter a situation where something will be slow. 3'rd party service that takes 10 seconds to crunch data for you? Tons of database work? Generating a PDF and then emailing it? Save your Rails app some sweat and your users some heartache by offloading that slow job into an asynchronously processed queue and watch your troubles go away (or at least greatly diminish). We'll mainly discuss Resque but we'll talk about other options as well and why the term 'asynchronous' can be misleading.

David Kapp from Coshx Labs works on plenty of Ruby/Rails/JavaScript/CoffeeScript applications, but he also likes trying out other technologies as well. In a previous developer life he did C++/Java/Python for a large company. He prefers "agile" to "Agile" and "process" to "Process." When not coding he loves his wife, his cats, video games, and board games.

Advanced Speaker/Talk: Richard Schneeman, Millions of Apps: What we've Learned

Heroku has deployed millions of web apps. When you've run that many applications, it's hard not to notice when frameworks and developers do things wrong, and when they do them right. We've taken a look at the most common patterns and boiled down the best of our advice in to 12 simple factors that can help you build your next app to be stable, successful, and scaleable. After this talk you'll walk away with in depth knowledge of web framework design patterns and practical examples of how to improve your application code.

Richard "@schneems" writes Ruby at Heroku at teaches Rails at the University of Texas. When he isn't obsessively compulsively playing Starcraft 2 he writes such gems as Wicked, Sextant, and oPRO. Check out his over 40+ hours of online course material from UT on Rails.

December 11, 2012 - Austin Holiday Web Bash

Austin Holiday Web Bash 2012 details Bash RSVP