Peter Marklund's Home

• What it is: A free and informal meeting for people interested in Ruby on Rails. An opportunity to network and share experiences.
• Date and time: Tuesday the 9th of May at 18:30
• Place: XLENT, Regeringsgatan 67, third floor - map. We will be in a conference room with a projector and room for 20 people. Bring a laptop if you can.
• Signup: Please signup by sending an email to peter_marklund AT fastmail dot fm. The number of seats is limited to 20.
• Agenda:
  • 18:30-18:45 Participants present themselves
  • 18:45-19:15 Presentation 1 - Test Driven Development - Peter Marklund
  • 19:15-19:45 Presentation 2 - DRY up your ActiveRecord Code with Scoping - Marcus Ahnve
  • 19:45-20:15 Break with coffee/tea and cake
  • 20:15-20:45 Presentation 3 - Ajax Scaffolding - Nic Williams
  • 20:45-21:15 Presentation 4 - Extending Rails with Modules and Plugins - Martin Kihlgren
  • 21:15-22:00 Concluding discussion
• Participants:
  • Andre Ekespong - Xlent
  • Peter Marklund - freelancer
  • Marcus Ahnve - Valtech
  • Peter Krantz (unconfirmed) - Valtech
  • Nic Williams - Tele2
  • Martin Kihlgren - Adocca
  • Teddy Zetterlund - Adocca
  • Peter Bengtson (unconfirmed) - Adocca
  • Tomas Jogin - Comigo (built Avinet.se)
  • Joel Junström (unconfirmed) - Winston Design
  • Jan Andersson (unconfirmed) - Gear
• Organizers:
  • Andre Ekespong - Xlent
  • Peter Marklund - freelancer

• Presentation Guideline:

Each presentation is up to 20 minutes long followed by a 10 minute discussion. The presentations should be in the Rails tradition of "show don't tell". We prefer short presentations with code samples from recipes applied to real problems over the traditional type lengthy and theoretical Powerpoint presentations.

• Reading tip: Rails Recipes by Chad Fowler. Here is what Mike Clark says about the book:

"Now, I know Rails well enough that over time I may have stumbled on some of the solutions, but that's not the point. With a collection of great recipes at hand - In-Place Form Editing, Live Search, RJS Templates, Polymorphic Associations, Tagging, Syndicate Your Site with RSS, and Sending Email with Attachments to name a few - I can quickly give my app the functionality today's web users have come to expect, then move on to the features that really set it apart from the crowd."

• Possible Discussion Points
  • The web 2.0 frontend - Ajax, RJS, and Javascript. How do we best build fast, user friendly, and yet accessible UIs?
  • Deployment. Choosing OS, database server, and web server. Experience with hosting companies. What are the main scalability issues? Caching strategies - using memcached etc.
  • Reusing code across projects and websites - plugins, engines, components, and what have you. How do you choose between these techniques? How do they work?
  • Human oriented programming. How concise should we make our code? How much should happen on a single line? When should we break lines up and use temporary variables? What are the characteristics of beautiful code?
  • Using the right tool for the job. For what tasks is Ruby better suited than say Bash, Perl, Python, or Java?
  • How much automated testing is worthwhile? How do we know when testing doesn't pay off? Are there certain types of programs for which automated testing doesn't make sense? How much test coverage should we strive for? How do we measure test coverage?
  • Which Rails Recipes have people used? What about versioning, tagging, and migrations?