LA Ruby / Ruby on Rails Monthly Meetup

This month's meetup will be held at AT&T Interactive in Glendale.

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 (https://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.

Rack Middleware as a General Purpose Abstraction by John Bender

This is a dry run for John's LARubyConf presentation.

We've all seen the monolithic Rails model, pages and pages of methods all dumped into one class. Inevitably someone starts moving things around just to feel better about the loc count without making any real difference. How can we reify actions on an object and simplify our classes?

In this talk we'll examine Rack middleware as a general purpose method of object composition, see examples of it at work in Vagrant, and use these ideas to simplify an existing application.

John Bender is the co-creator of Vagrant, a jQuery Mobile contributor, and a recovering polygot. During the day he works full-time on jQuery Mobile at Adobe and otherwise spends his time hacking on open source. John shares his thoughts at http://johnbender.us and as @johnbender on Twitter.

Using Ruby with R by Sean Marcia

We great power, comes great responsibility. As we all know, the knowledge of statistics comes with awesome power that is so often turned towards evil purposes. Starting with a very brief introduction to statistics I will show how you can easily take advantage of R's awesome statistical power from within your Ruby programs for good.

My day job is as a programmer at the behavioral research lab at George Mason University and a software developer at the AARP. My fun job is organizer of the Arlington Ruby Users Group.

Parking

Enter guest parking on Brand, just south of the 134 freeway. AT&T will validate parking.