The September Meetup will be at Microsoft's San Francisco office.

Beginner's Presentation: "Who Took Away My Static Typing?" by David Pollak. In short, Ruby for Java Developers.

"Ruby and Java are twin languages, separated at the birth of the Object Oriented revolution, only to meet each other many years later. They are both strongly typed, OO languages with a rich set of tools. They differ syntactically, but not conceptually. This presentation will explore the similarities and differences between Java and Ruby and their environments. The presentation will offer a series of ways that Java developers can use Ruby for small projects to get their feet wet with Ruby."

Practitioner's Presentation: "Scaling Rails with Memcache" by Chris Wanstrath. Chris returns with a presentation this month that should interest a lot of people...

"Memcached is a distributed, in-memory caching server used by high traffic sites such as Slashdot, Wikipedia, LiveJournal, and GameSpot to alleviate database stress. Rails natively supports using memcached as a session and page fragment store, but what if you want to do more? Find out how Chowhound and Chow.com use memcached with Rails, and learn some tricks picked up over the course of a year spent working on GameSpot's caching system."

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David Pollak's Bio:

David has been developing commercial software for 28 years. He founded Athena Design and wrote Mesa, the first real-time spreadsheet. David wrote Integer, the first online, collaborative spreadsheet. Since 2000, David has been developing domain specific languages for security and general web development. David lives in San Francisco with his wife, twin toddlers, dog, two cats, but no partridges or pear trees.

Chris Wanstrath's Bio:

Chris Wanstrath is a failed HazMat Engineer whose negligence cost him his career. After a brief period of meditative introspection, Chris decided to become a web developer and sought a language that shared his newfound respect for inward searching and, ultimately, zen. His journey led him to Ruby.

He currently works on CNET's Rails sites, Chow.com and Chowhound.com. In his free time he can be found camping.

For more information, see http://www.microsoft....