Nov 2009 SF Ruby Meetup at Zendesk

Please give a GIGANTIC hand to Zendesk for hosting us this month! And super props to Assistant Organizer Barce for arranging this venue while I was underwater.

Zendesk by Morten Primdahl
Morten will give a brief presentation about the history of Zendesk - on "how we started out with 3 mongrels and then step by step grew it to our current infrastructure, the pain points we've run into, and what we see happening from here."

Apigee by Brian Mulloy
"We just launched a new, free service called Apigee (http://www.apigee.com...) that I think would be interesting to the crew, especially to the Rails folks. Apigee is for people who consume web APIs in mashups or for folks who provide web APIs."

Here is a TechCrunch article of the launch
http://www.techcrunch...

CDN Fu by Curtis Spencer
CDN Fu is a simple domain specific language written in Ruby by Curtis Spencer for connecting assets such as images, javascript, and stylesheets with content distribution networks. It handles some of the dirty work associated with minification of assets, versioning on the CDN, and setting correct HTTP headers to maximize caching. These are steps in the deployment process that come as an afterthought but can yield extreme performance boosts in a page's load time. It is built upon a pluggable architecture consisting of 4 steps: preprocessing, listing, minification, and uploading. Initially, it supports YUI minification and uploading to Amazon S3/Cloudfront. It can be used as a standalone executable for use in non Rails projects or installed as a Rails plugin to make default configuration even simpler.

Webvanta by Christopher Haupt
"The Webvanta hosted service for designers evolved out of the BuildingWebApps.com portal we built to support the LearningRails podcast. Little did we know while building the sample CMS-like project for the podcast that we'd be simultaneously creating its 'big brother' behind the scenes. In this talk, we'll take a tour of the technology behind the app. When we needed to integrate our Content Management System component with our portal database technology, we looked at the RadiantCMS project for inspiration. We'll dive in to how we are using the Radius tag language gem (from Radiant) in an expanded role to implement dynamic database constructs that our customers can use to build simple, data-driven sites without 'programming' outside of HTML."

Christopher Haupt is the CTO of Webvanta Inc, a Bay-Area startup dedicated to building a hosted platform for web designers who need to construct sophisticated database backed sites, but want to avoid server side programming or system management. Christopher is also co-host of the LearningRails podcast/screencast series. Previously he was Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems, where he lead the company's Photoshop branded online service efforts as well as serving as senior engineering management on the Photoshop line of desktop products.

Indoctrinating the Next Generation: Teaching Ruby to Kids by Sarah Mei
Sarah will give us the Release Candidate of her RubyConf talk:

"Ruby is a great first programming language for kids of all ages. But how do you introduce it in a way that piques their curiosity and encourages them to dig deeper? It's not as hard as you think. I'll demonstrate how I used Ruby, Shoes, short iterations, and frequent deployment to get a big group of high school kids excited about programming, even though I hadn't done much teaching before. I'll also show how to adjust for younger kids, all the way down to elementary school age. You'll leave with ideas you can use in a classroom, an after-school club, or with the kids in your life at home."