The Vancouver Ruby/Rails September Meetup

We have two great talks this month!

1. DSLs in Ruby (Scott Patten, 15-20 min)
2. Developing Facebook Apps (Paul Prescod + Vince Hodges, 40-45 min)

After the talks, beer at Steamworks will definitely be in order. Since the meetup starts at 7, I assume we'll get to Steamworks at about 8:30. The talk details are below...

1. DSLs in Ruby (Scott Patten)
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   Talk description:
   "Domain Specific Language" means different things to different people. In this talk, Scott will be describing how DSLs in Ruby allow you to program closer to the problem domain, making your code more concise and readable. Specifically, Scott will be describing how he used Ruby to create a Domain Specific Language to interface between Ruby and the Ploticus graphing package. The actual code for a stripped down DSL is only ~60 lines long, so there will be ample time to go through the implementation in detail.

Bio:
Scott is a physicist who found himself spending more and more time coding and less and less time in the lab. Scott also started programming web apps in Ruby on Rails in his spare time. Finally, he gave in to the inevitable, cut himself loose from his job, and started looking at ways to get paid to do Ruby and Rails work.

Currently, Scott is working full time on a scientific graphing web application called Plot-O-Matic (www.plotomatic.com), written in Ruby on Rails. It's in beta, so the 'working' part has been achieved, but the 'getting paid' part is still pending.

2. Developing Facebook Apps (Paul Prescod + Vince Hodges)
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   Abstract:
   Facebook is one of the fastest growing applications in the Web's history. Deploying applications within the Facebook environment has some great advantages. First, you can have a pretty good idea of the demographic of your audience. Second, the environment is extremely viral. Third, you can take make interesting applications that take advantage of all of the delicious data in the user's profile -- especially their list of friends.

Bio:
Vince Hodges is a senior software developer and has worked on a variety of projects and industries over the past 17 years including financial services, telephony, peer 2 peer music sharing and most recently as an entrepreneur with his own startup developing consumer web applications. Today, Vince is a senior developer working on Kinzin.

Paul Prescod is director of application development at Kinzin. Paul is co-author of the XML Handbook, author of numerous articles on XML and REST and contributor to open source XML tools and open standards.

Kinzin is an online gathering place for families to privately share photos, stories, and recipes as well as plan family events.

Schedule note:

I'm tentatively thinking of moving the meetup to the second Tuesday of every month, since the Python user group is on the first Tuesday of every month. We can discuss the best time for everyone at this meetup or in email (if you can't get to the meetup because of the schedule, you won't be there to discuss it!). [Also, the first Tuesday of September is right after a long weekend, and many people may be away. So this meetup needs to move regardless.] I still need to confirm the availability of the space and work out one possible scheduling conflict, so this meetup may move from September 11 to a different day. I'll know fairly soon and update the description accordingly...