November DCRUG: Stripe + Optimization vs Testing

Our meetings are open to all experience levels, from total novices to expert Rubyists.

Current agenda:

"Stripe: $how Me the Money" by Lisa Schaefer, Ph.D. - Hello! Clients are merely a means to a paycheck for Jerry Maguire. But when we dump the greedy gateways & put customers needs first, we finally get Shown the Money. Stripe is a payment gateway created especially for startup developers to allow customers to seamlessly purchase products and services. No more losing customers over the hassle of making a simple payment. This presentation will go over how to implement one-time payments and subscriptions in your rails app, what data Stripe makes available to help developers, and the gotchas to look out for when using coffeescript examples and recent versions of JQuery. I had you at Hello. "Optimization vs Testing: Feel the Embrace of the Multi-armed Bandit" by Brian Muller - Typical online A/B testing can give you a permanent, global view of the best of multiple options (if there is one). Sometimes, however, you may actually need an adaptive system that is capable of self-adjusting much faster than a typical test would allow. For instance, if you want to try a crazy idea that could increase conversion - or totally destroy it - you wouldn't want to risk half of your audience on a gamble. If a system could detect horrible conversion rates - and then automagically know to not show the poor choice - then there is no risk. A system that optimizes also doesn't require that you know and understand p-values, confidence intervals, or statistical power. In this talk, the concept of multi-armed bandit optimization will be introduced and compared to A/B testing. The Rails gem that provides this optimization - Bandit - will be introduced and it's usage demonstrated. We now meet monthly at Logik's new headquaters, now located at 1400 I (Eye) Street NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20005. The closest Metro stop is McPherson Square.

We always need presenters, so if you have a topic or project on which you'd like to do a 30-minute presentation on anything Ruby-related, Rails-related or possibly of interest to Ruby developers, please contact our organizers Dave Naffis and Jim Gay at info@dcrug.org and we'll schedule you to speak. If you have presented before, you are welcome to give a presentation on a new topic. This is a great chance for some of you guys and gals lingering in the back of the room to share some of the cool things you are working on. Don't be shy -- you're among fellow geeks. :)

As always, we'll have an ample supply of free pizza and soda for all attendees, so don't worry about eating dinner beforehand.

And we'll be heading to a nearby bar after the meeting, to unwind and socialize with fellow techies.