Beyond celebrating that RubyConf is in town this week, we'll also be hosting a set of presentations from Dr. Nic Williams and Wes Beary of Engine Yard. Their two talks deal with how Ruby developers can maintain better code quality standards through use of great tools and smart practices.

From 5:00p to 7:00p iSeatz will host a Happy Hour with refreshments and recreational activities on tap, including perhaps some Guitar Hero and Nerf Bowling. iSeatz is located in suite 100 of the IP Building, just across the hall from Launchpad. Capdeville will also be pouring free beer for us. Please RSVP for the Happy Hour separately.

At 7:00p we'll all move over the LaunchPad for the presentations, which will begin shortly after.

eXperience Driven Design
Presenter: Wes Beary

Love doing Open Source but have a full-time job, perhaps a spouse, some kids, and addictions to several TV series? In this session I'll share how to maximize the impact and value of your limited time for open source. We'll focus on you writing better code for yourself, users and (eventually) other contributors.

Come interested, leave excited and together we will write better code.

Continuous Integration with Hudson CI: Easier to do than not to
Presenter: Dr. Nic Williams

First we learnt to use Rails, then we learnt to write tests, then we learnt to write integration tests, and then we learnt that continuous integration was a pain. For some developers and some projects, the pain barrier is high enough to not even setup a CI server; or if the CI system breaks it often stays broken and people stop caring.

CI is important. It can also be simple. Simple to setup and simple to maintain.

For example: How to setup a Hudson CI server in 3 minutes. How to have your Rails project's tests running in 5 minutes. How do parallelize your tests using slaves. How to replicate your production environment for running your tests RATHER than your local development environment using virtual machines.