SFRails Meetup - Playing Nice with Unicorns + Email Best Practices

Agenda

6:30 Food/Beer/Networking
7:00 Intros/Sharing of Tips and Tools
• Talk 1: Play Nice With Unicorns (Desk.com)
• Raffle of LAUNCH passes
• Talk 2: Email Best Practices (SendGrid)
8:30 End

Event Note:

Please check in with the Salesforce.com volunteers in the lobby of The Landmark @ One Market Street (the corner of Spear Street and Market). They will direct you to the 6th floor registration table.

Talk 1: Play Nice With Unicorns
Joslyn Esser will talk about properly configuring and optimizing the Unicorn web server, backed with examples and experiences while rolling it out in the Desk.com stack. He'll show how to avoid request snowballs, leveraging Unix's Copy-On-Write, ensuring your application code is eager loaded, failing fast, proper load balancing, minimizing impact of upgrades, and much more!About the Speaker

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Joslyn Esser is a senior engineer at Desk.com and has been crafting Ruby code for over five years. After designing and implementing the core of Desk.com's API v2, his current focus is on bridging the gap between development and operations. When not building tools to keep his peers and customers at Desk happy, your likely to find him shooting hoops, out on the dance floor, or coding a swarm of semi-intelligent bots to rule his favorite video games.

Raffle of 20 LAUNCH Passes

The LAUNCH Festival (http://hackathon.launch.co/) is coming up in San Francisco, February 24-26. The producers have offered #SFRails 20+ free passes for us to pass out to members. We'll raffle a number of these off to those who attend.

Included in the festival is LAUNCH Hackathon #3. Grand prizes include $2M investment or $10k cash, and additional prizes from API partners. It’s free but space is limited to 800 participants. Apply here: http://hackathon.launch.co .

Talk 2: Email Best Practices

Nick Quinlan from SendGrid will be in to provide some solid lessons on sending emails from within your application. Part technology, part growth-hacking, and part just doing the right thing. Come stocked with questions because Nick likes solving problems and making for better apps.

• What good email looks like
• What not to do
° How to make un-engaging emails
° How to get marked as spam
• Best practices for sending mail from Rails

About the Speaker

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Nic (http://nicholasquinlan.com/)k Quinlan (http://nicholasquinlan.com/) is a SendGrid Developer Evangelist based out of San Francisco. He works to make developers lives easier by providing them with the help they need to grow their ideas.

About the Location/Host

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About Desk.com
Desk.com provides the leading customer service application, helping fast-growing companies deliver outstanding customer support. Desk.com's intuitive user interface and powerful features make solving customers' problems more efficient and more fun for the entire company.

About Salesforce Salesforce is the enterprise cloud computing leader. Their social and mobile cloud technologies — including their flagship sales and CRM applications — help companies connect with customers, partners, and employees in entirely new ways.

Other Sponsors

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Iron.io is the maker of IronMQ, a scalable cloud-based message queue, and IronWorker, an elastic task queue/worker service. Iron.io's services are designed for doing things asynchronously and operating at scale. (@getiron)