July 2008 SF Ruby Meetup

Many thanks to SlideShare for hosting this Meetup.

PRESENTATIONS

Jonathan Boutelle of SlideShare

Jon will talk about how SlideShare is using Ruby.

Raul Parolari will touch on metaprogramming details - "class_inheritable_accessor: unknown heroes of Rails startup".

Class variables and class instance variables have pros and cons (that programmers have discussed for ever since the beginning of time). Sometimes we would wish for a variable that had their qualities, but not their defects; wishful thinking, right? not in the Rails world! where they exist baptized as 'class_inheritable_accessor' (which by the way plays an important role at startup). This short talk discusses the 3 types of variables, and how the new one works (yes, another metaprogramming Ruby trick, at the service of the "Rails magic").

Bala Paranj will talk about Design Patterns in Ruby

Paul Graham said "When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough? often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write."

In this presentation we will see how some of the GOF patterns can be implemented using powerful features of Ruby in a simpler fashion.

Lightning Q&A by you

The last two Rails Newbies Hack Sessions filled up faster than [fill in your favorite euphemism] and many folks hankered to get in on one. Here's an opportunity to asked the whole group to help you with Ruby & RoR bugs/questions/issues that's been stumping you. Plug your laptop into the projector; or simply stand up and talk about it.

Stay tuned for more details

We're accepting proposals for presentations and Lightning Talks. If you'd emailed me and didn't get a reply, try again. :-)

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