January 2016 - 10th anniversary

January will mark Boulder Ruby's 10th anniversary as our first meeting was in January 2006. Boy how time flies!

At 6pm we'll start the meeting with our Beginner's Track. Marty will lead this session on a basic developer workflow focusing on the nuances of verification and awareness. It might seem trivial but having a solid foundation in your workflow is vital.

We'll have food and beverages, including cupcakes, sometime around 6:30pm with networking.

At 7:15pm we'll shift to our three presentations. Tim Pease will present first on Integrating neopixels and web services on the RaspberryPi. This talk is aimed at having fun with Ruby. And what is more fun that making lights turn on and off from a web browser. By the end of the talk you'll be prepared to implement your own Philips Hue lighting system that is a bit clunkier and costs more money. But it will be yours to do with as you please!

Up second is Todd Resudek who will cover ReThinkDB. RethinkDB pushes JSON to your apps in realtime. When your app polls for data, it becomes slow, unscalable, and cumbersome to maintain. RethinkDB is the open-source, scalable database that makes building realtime apps dramatically easier.

Ara Howard will close out the meeting speaking on The Big Mind of Developers. Technologists hold the keys behind the most powerful force in the modern world. Recently, they’ve forgotten not only how to wield it, but that they own it. It hasn’t been so long ago that technology represented hope, that it represented power, and, most of all, that it represented change. Our hacker culture has settled, and it now accepts meaningless goals, meaningless rewards, and meaningless lives. But it doesn't have to be this way.