Orlando Ruby Users Group

At Railsconf this year a bunch of us folks from Envy Labs put together talks to give at the conference.  What this means is that we have some killer content for the next few months to attempt to revive the Ruby Users Group.

This month.. Thursday, May 10th at 7 PM Olivier Lacan will be presenting  RVM & Essential Rails Development Tools. Working with Rails often means switching between several Ruby versions back and forth which is made almost seamless by RVM. It also involves several simple command line tools like Pry, Guard, and Pow and that will make your development life so much easier.

Envy Labs will provide free drinks and beer.  Yup. FREE BEER!  Come hang out in our space, learn some, and talk Ruby.  =)

Oh, and please take a moment to RSVP over on http://www.meetup.com/Orlando-Ruby/.  Yup, we’re moving over to Meetup.. so this page may end up Redirecting over there any moment now.

Also, if you’re not subscribed to the Orlando Tech Events newsletter, you may want to go do that now, there are a ton of great events around town this month.

Well.. One official meeting and another Code School Beta.

Thursday, March 8th, 7 to 9 PM

Join us at Panino’s Pizza in Downtown Orlando on Thursday, Feb 9th from 7pm to 9pm for our first meeting of the new year! We may hack together or try a Coding Dojo, like the Orlando Dojo group: we pick a problem (usually from Project Euler), pick a language (Ruby, duh), and discuss an implementation, then get to work!

Tuesday, March 13th, 6:30 to 10 PM

It’s time again to Beta Test the next course at Code School, The Anatomy of Backbone.js.  Backbone.js gives client-side structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.  This beta will take place the night of Tuesday, March 13th, starting at 6:30 PM at Envy Labs.  There will be free food and beer provided and you’ll need to RSVP over on Eventbrite.

If you’re looking for more Orlando Tech Events, be sure to subscribe to the Orlando Tech Events newsletter I help put together.

It’s time again to Beta Test the next course at Code School, Rails Testing For Zombies is the 3rd course in our zombie series.  This will take place the night of Wednesday, February 15th, starting at 6:30 PM at Envy Labs.  There will be free food and beer provided for those who show up.  For more information and to RSVP, head over to Eventbrite.

Join us at Panino’s Pizza in Downtown Orlando on Thursday, Feb 9th from 7pm to 9pm for our first meeting of the new year! I thought we could try a Coding Dojo, like the Orlando Dojo group: we pick a problem (usually from Project Euler), pick a language (Ruby, duh), and discuss an implementation, then get to work! We work in pairs to practice pair programming, we write tests first to practice test-driven development, and we time-box each pair (usually 5 minutes) so that everyone who wants to gets a chance to code. As for pairs, we use the pilot-copilot method – the pilot writes code while the copilot kinda navigates and offers advice – and after 5 minutes, we rotate: the pilot goes back to the audience, the copilot becomes the pilot, and someone from the audience becomes the new copilot. We keep going until we finish the problem (rarely), run out of time (usually), or run out of people (or loop). It’s a lot of fun. Seeya there!

We are ready to Beta test our next course at Code School, CSS Cross Country. Cross-Country is an intermediate course for those who are already familiar with the basics of CSS and want to learn more about best practices. We’re stepping back to give users a comprehensive understanding of major CSS fundamentals and techniques at a professional-use level.   Topics covered include:

• Level 1 – Adding Style, Selectors, Cascade Order, Floating
• Level 2 – Clearing Floats, Inheritance, and Specificity
• Level 3 – The Box Model, Positioning, Z-Index
• Level 4 – Staying DRY, Display Types, Centering
• Level 5 – Protecting Your Layout
• Level 6 – Image Use & Cropping
• Level 7 – Image Replacement & Sprites
• Level 8 – Pseudo Classes & Elements

The Beta will be 6:30 PM to 10 PM on Thursday, January 19th at Envy Labs and dinner will be provided.  You’ll need to RSVP over on EventBrite

We are ready to Beta test our next course at Code School, A Sip of CoffeeScript. As you may know CoffeeScript ships with Rails 3.1 by default, so if you haven’t learned it yet, here is your chance.  Topics covered include:

• Level 1 – Variables, functions, and the command line.
• Level 2 – Converting jQuery into CoffeeScript
• Level 3 – Conditionals, operators, and comparisons.
• Level 4 – Arrays, objects, iteration, and list comprehension.
• Level 5 – More advanced jQuery into CoffeeScript
• Level 6 – Object orientation, inheritance, fat arrow, and encapsulation.

The Beta will be 6:30 PM to 10 PM on Thursday, December 8th at Envy Labs and dinner will be provided.  You’ll need to RSVP over on EventBrite

jQuery is the default JavaScript framework in Rails 3.1, and on Thursday, November 10th, 7 PM at the Envy Labs office we’ll be Beta Testing Code School‘s new jQuery Air 2 Course. This course covers move advanced jQuery topics such as Binding, Unbinding, Live/Delegate, AJAX calls, Effects, Effect Speed/Easing, Queues, Delays, creating Utility Methods / Plugins, Custom Events, and finally jQuery Templates. Not a small list.

If you wish to attend you’ll need to RSVP on Eventbrite, see you next week!  Oh, and we’ll bring free dinner =)

The next ORUG meeting we’re going to be doing a walk through Rails for Zombies 2: Resurrected, our next Code School course which should be coming out in the next few weeks. If you haven’t done much Rails in a while (or you’re still new), this is a perfect opportunity to catch up and continue your learning. This will take place down at Envy Labs, September 7th from 7 PM to 10 PM. We’ll also have free food at 6:30 PM if you want to come by for dinner. You’ll want to register at http://rfz2.eventbrite.com/ and the description is below:

Done with Rails for Zombies but can’t stop the craving for a second corpse? This sequel picks up where Rails for Zombies #1 leaves off, but this time the game engine has been new and improved, keeping track of points and offering you hints to help you along (like our other courses).

Gregg Pollack is resurrected in this paid course to advance your Rails knowledge with 5 new videos and a bunch of new code challenges. We’ll jump into the command line, migrations, more ActiveRecord, forms, using AJAX, and even a taste of the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline with SCSS and CoffeeScript.

If you’re an experienced Rails developer and you just want to come and hang out, you’re welcome to stop by, have a free beer/whiskey, and play some ping pong. It’ll be a grand old time.

Next Thursday would typically be our next meeting, but next Wednesday is Build Guild Orlando. So to help them start their new event with a bang, lets just head over there for our meetup this month. More information and RSVP Here. Some of the Envy Labs team should be over there AND we’ll be handing out a bunch of $15 gift cards to Code School.

If you just can’t stay away from Envy Labs for a month, on Tuesday July 19th from 7 PM – 10 PM we’ll be doing a trial run of our newest Code School course, Functional HTML5 & CSS3 by Jason VanLue. As we do with all our courses, we like to invite people into our office to play through it and get their feedback before we do a release to the public. If you haven’t learned much HTML5 / CSS3 yet, you might dig it.. it’s a beginner course. Register and more info here.

It’s been a while, but we’re back and next Thursday, June 16th and we have two presentations (and FREE DINNER) you won’t want to miss. First up Jacob Swanner will be giving a presentation on CoffeeScript, The Basics. Since Rails 3.1 is going to be adding support for CoffeeScript, now seems like the perfect time to learn about it, if you haven’t already. We will cover what CoffeeScript is, the syntax, and how you’d use it.

Next up Eric Allam will be giving a talk on the Asset Pipeline in Rails 3.1. We’ll discover how Rails 3.1 promotes Assets to a first-class Rails citizen in 3.1, and how the new Asset Pipeline allows you to use new technologies like CoffeeScript and Sass to write cleaner and more maintainable code.

Starting at 6:30 PM we’ll have free food from Gringos Locos, and at 7 PM the talks will start. We’ll be holding the meeting at Envy Labs office (http://bit.ly/envylabs). There should be plenty of free street parking and the elevators are right behind the Corona Cigar company on the corner of Orange and Pine. There should be someone in the lobby to buzz you up for the meeting. If not you can call me 407-754-5517. If you park in the garage and you can’t get up to the 10th floor, come down to the lobby and we’ll buzz you up. If you can use your Ruby skills to hack the elevators, you get extra points.

Hope to see you next Thursday the 16th!