LA Ruby / Ruby on Rails May Meetup

This month's meetup will be held at YP headquarters in Glendale. YP will also be sponsoring food.

Schedule

7:00 – 7:15 Open
7:15 – 7:30 Introductions
7:30 – 9:00 Presentations
9:00 – 10:00 Open / Networking

Presentations

We need presentations for this meetup! Each meetup features 3-4 presentations of 30 minutes each, and should pertain to Ruby / Ruby on Rails, or be of general interest to the Ruby community. Please contact Alf Mikula (http://www.meetup.com/laruby/members/5722863/) if you are interested in presenting. Include a title, brief summary of your proposed presentation, and a brief bio about yourself. Please see past meetups for examples.

Ruby Made Simple: Iterators + Code Blocks by John Schmidt

An entry level introduction to using iterators and code blocks in Ruby.

Revisited Kata: Post Clojure Influence by Daniel Dyba

Two years ago I worked on one of Dave Thomas' kata Data Munging. Just last week I completed the same Kata only this time, in between completing each run I picked up Clojure along the way. This talk will take a look back at my first approach and compare it with the more recent approach and discuss some of the thoughts that went on when designing the new solution. Some of the thoughts I will share came from what I have grokked so far from functional programming and Clojure.

I've been programming for four years, spending most of my time learning about Ruby and Rails. I work as a Network Security Engineer and have long been contemplating working with software full-time. This year I began my job search to switch careers and am very excited about that. In my spare time I enjoy rock climbing, teaching myself foreign languages, and learning about how to learn. You can find me on twitter: @dyba.

Level up your skills with Ruby code-diving by Evan Dorn

Hunting through other people's code can be intimidating -- especially in large, spaghettified, and heavily meta-programmed codebases like Rails. Even just finding a method definition can be a royal pain. But sometimes StackOverflow doesn't have the explanation for that annoying exception deep inside ActiveSupport, and there's just no solution but code diving. I'll introduce a bunch of tools, techniques, and quick tips that are useful when diving headfirst into the spooky depths of Rails. With a little knowledge and practice, you'll be swimming through foreign code like a pro.

I'm a lifetime geek/hacker/engineer/scientist/maker and obsessive creative, and part-time evil capitalist. A few years ago I left science for a while to turn my web development hobby into a career, and founded Logical Reality Design, Inc. LRD is a webdev contracting firm with a distributed workforce of L.A. area locals. We've done all sorts of work for all sorts of clients, but lately have specialized in startups, code rescue, and Ruby on Rails development.

Rails As She Is Spoke by Giles Bowkett

The greatest failure in the history of linguistic scholarship was English As She Is Spoke, a Portugese->English phrasebook written in the 1800s by a man who spoke not a single word of English. He built his book by combining a French->English dictionary with a Portguese->French phrasebook. (He did not speak French either.) As a long-time Rails developer, I love Rails, but I can't help noticing how much the Rails relationship to classical OOP terminology reminds me of English As She Is Spoke. This talk will go into detail, shed light on some of Rails's more befuddling quirks, and help you reason about your Rails applications and code with more clarity than ever before.

Giles Bowkett's been building Rails apps since 2005. He's given countless presentations and written two ebooks on Rails. He's one bad mother - shut your mouth. (Just talking about Giles.)

Parking

Park in the guest parking for 611 N. Brand. There are entrances on Brand, Doran, and Sanchez. YP will validate your parking.