LARuby October Meetup

We're ready to have the October Meetup and Border Stylo has offered up their location. There's room for one more speaker for this month. If you have an interesting subject you want to speak on - please let me know. As of today (9-28), we have room for one more presentation. Send your proposal to: jrfent@gmail.com

If you have a great idea that you'd like us to have a presentation on - please let us know and we'll see what we can do to make it happen. Just use the IDEAS (https://www.meetup.com/laruby/ideas) tool here in the site.

Last thing: I'm looking for a couple supporters to host the food & bevs for this meetup. Please drop me an email if you'd like to support this. I've started posting logos and links on the site for the previous & current months supporters.

To everyone who participates in this community: THANK YOU!

Approximate Schedule:

7:00-7:15 Open / Networking
7:15-7:30 Introductions
7:30-9:30 Presentations (25 minute presentation + 5 minute Q&A)
9:30-10:00 Open / Networking

Here are the speakers for this month:

Ian Sefferman on Vanity

Vanity is a Rails based A/B testing framework. With Vanity, you can easily test multiple variations of any feature and track each variation's effectiveness. For example, you can try multiple versions of a "Buy" Button on an e-commerce site and find which one converts the most visitors into purchasers.

Ian Sefferman is a co-founder at AppStoreHQ (https://www.appstorehq... (https://www.appstorehq.com)), a mobile app search and discovery site. AppStoreHQ helps mobile users find the best mobile apps (iPhone, iPad, Android, and HTML5) and helps developers create, support, and promote their apps. AppStoreHQ also owns and operates iPhoneDevSDK (https://www.iphonedevs... (https://www.iphonedevsdk.com)), the largest independent iPhone developer forum. Previously, Ian was a software engineer at Amazon.com.

Evan Dorn on NinjaScript

NinjaScript is an unobtrusive JavaScript library for jQuery that was designed to make AJAX and rich behaviors much easier. Rails 3 removes the obtrusive JS helpers like form_remote_for, but unfortunately doesn't provide a standardized solution for replacing them. NinjaScript provides that: convert any form to an ajax form with a single line of code. NS also provides a standard set of tools for building and reusing rich behaviors, and automatically rebinds all your behaviors to relevant DOM nodes after every change in the page structure, so AJAXy page rebuilds don't lose your behaviors. Unlike event delegation methods (including the ones built into jQuery), NinjaScript's rebinding works with all DOM events, including mouseover/mouseout.

Evan is the owner and lead developer of Logical Reality Design, a Rails-centric web development and services firm in Altadena, CA. LRD switched to Rails as our primary development environment in late 2006, and has grown rapidly in the last two years.

Justin Collins on Brakeman

Brakeman is a static analysis tool for finding web vulnerabilities in Ruby on Rails applications. This new tool provides a crucial testing step in the development process, without requiring any deployment of the application. The talk will discuss what Brakeman does and does not do, how it works, and why everyone writing Rails applications should be using it.

Justin is a graduate student at UCLA who has enjoyed using Ruby for the past five years. He developed Brakeman during a summer internship at AT&T Interactive.

Greg Moeck on Clean RSpec

Tests are a huge asset to any application in that they ensure that its functionality is maintained. However they can - and ought to be - much more than that. Your test suite ought to be a specification of what your application does, not how it does it. This talk will aim to some RSpec best practices to ensure that your tests are both more readable and maintainable while at the same time doing a better job documenting the functionality of your application.

Greg is the lead software engineer at Wetzel & Sons Moving and Storage in Pacoima, CA. He learned about agile and Rails in 2007 while trying to maintain and upgrade a 200,000 lines of code application written in spaghetti php.