March DCRUG: Migrating to Heroku + Functional Programming in Ruby

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

Current agenda:

"Migrating to Heroku with Zero Downtime" by Hassan Shahid

KaBOOM! recently went through a full infrastructure migration from Rackspace to Heroku. Along with migrating all our web applications, our five-person team changed databases from MySQL to Postgres, changed our full-text-search engine, built a mobile-friendly version of our mapping app, and maintained business as usual with zero-downtime. I'll share our reasons behind migrating, why we chose Heroku, our approach, the tools we used, and lessons learned. "Functional Programming in Ruby" by Tucker Barbour

Ruby is known to most as an Object Oriented language. But Ruby has a lot of characteristics of a Functional language as well; and you probably use them every day and just don't know it. This talk will briefly discuss what is meant by Functional programming and how it's different from Object Orientation, along with their respective use cases. We'll continue by looking at what Functional paradigms are implemented in Ruby and which are not. We'll conclude by highlighting some use cases for Functional programming with Ruby. Bonus: May also include some examples of where Object Oriented and Functional programming meet to write powerful clean code.

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. If you're downstairs and need someone to let you into the building or the elevator, please give me a call at 202-374-7303 or tweet me at @naffis.

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 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.