WHEN: Tuesday January 19th @ 18:30
WHERE: CSC-249 Computing Science Centre, University of Alberta (map)

We had lots of new members out tonight, many of whom had come to hear or discuss a specific talk. Great to see so many people come out!

5-minute Ruby News

Next up, we’ve got a five minute recap of the big Ruby news from the past month. We focus on the big picture and only cover the big news stories. If you want to get regular news between meetups you should follow @yegrb on Twitter, and check our list of Ruby resources.

• GIS and GeoRails tutorial - Daniel Azuma has been presenting an 8-part tutorial on doing georails.
• RubyHeroes - Who has made a difference to your Ruby experience?
• foreman gem updates
• formtastic 2.1 beta released
• ruby 1.8.7 DoS vulnerability patch
• @darkhelmetlive is doing a t-shirt order. Let him know if you’re interested.
• @christiannaths is looking for projects his design students can participate in for his project class. Let him know!

Upcoming events

• Jan 18 - DemoCamp Edmonton
• Jan 25 - TedX Talk @Lunch on Re-thinking Open Source Culture
• Jan 27 - Startup Hackathon and Global Gamejam (Early bird until end of Jan. 19th)
• Apr 2-3 - JSConf US 2012 (Early bird tickets on sale January 18th, 2012 at 3:00PM Eastern Time, will sell out)
• Apr 23-25 - RailsConf 2012 (Registration now open)

Job announcements

There’s nothing better than landing a sweet Ruby job. Every month we share the latest Ruby and related job announcements with our members. If you’re hiring Rubyists let us know!

• Yardstick Software - seeking full-time Rails developer
• Lift - seeking Rails developers for full-time, part-time, contract
• Redman Technologies - seeking senior web developer

Lightning talks

After a short break for pizza, courtesy or Yardstick Software (thanks Don!), we moved on to the main part of each meetup, the lighting talks. We aim to have 2-3 of these. Each talk lasts 10-minutes with 5-minutes for questions afterwards.

• Nathan Bertram - Rails 3.1 asset pipeline
• Mark Bennett - JavaScript debugging in the trenches
• Sean Ouimet - The Mechanical Turk

Demo

Each month we challenge a local developer or company working with Ruby to demonstrate their project. The goal of this segment to to share the real applications being developed with Ruby in Edmonton. The project can be open or closed source, and companies are encouraged to demonstrate their products.

• Brendan Taylor - API client for Inkdit

Talk ideas

What talks would you like to see at our next meetup?

Drinks

The best part of the night for many of our members is after the talks are done, when we head to RATT (map) for food and drinks. This month was no exception and Inkdit kindly supplied a round for the table. Thanks!

WHEN: Tuesday January 17th @ 18:30
WHERE: CSC-249 Computing Science Centre, University of Alberta (map)

Welcome to 2012 everybody! We’ve got an exciting meetup lined up for you to kick off the new year with talks and demos galore.

• Mark Bennett - JavaScript debugging in the trenches
• Nathan Bertram - Rails 3.1 asset pipeline
• Sean Ouimet - The Mechanical Turk
• Brendan Taylor - API client for Inkdit

Afterwards, we’ll head out for food and beverages at RATT. If you can’t make the meetup, then you can find us there around 8:30.

Follow us on Twitter and Google+ for the latest updates.

WHAT: Monthly Hackup
WHEN: Monday Dec 5th, 2011 at 18:30
WHERE: IdeaLoft, 10355 105 St NW, Edmonton (map)

Join us for our monthly hackup this coming Monday evening at IdeaLoft. We’ll be ordering in pizza and writing code. Personal and work projects are welcome, and you don’t even have to work in Ruby (though you’ll get lots of help if you are!)

Follow us at @yegrb on Twitter and Google+ for the latest updates.

Don’t forget we’ve also got our Christmas meetup happening a week earlier that normal on Tuesday Dec 13th. Help us but together our agenda, or register to talk on the YEGrb wiki.

Thanks to everyone that came out to this last meetup. We did something a bit different and had Derick Bailey in to talk about backbone.js. It worked great, and we’re going to continue trying to get more speakers in to other events in the future. Let us know if there’s anyone you’d like us to try to track down!

We also had a number of new faces out at the meetup. It’s great to see new people coming out and remeber that all skill levels and experience are welcome.

News

• We had another hackup on Nov 7th. Thanks to everyone that came out!
• jQuery 1.7 released - live() is deprecated, new promises and pub/sub support, faster
• jQuery is going on a diet - lots more deprecations coming soon, looking for feedback on ways to slim down

Upcoming Events

• Nov 19 - StartupEdmonton is running a Twitter Hack Day (register)
• Nov 22 - DemoCamp 16 at TELUS Centre on the UofA campus (register)
• Dec 5 - Founders & Funders (register)
• Dec 5 - YEGrb hackup at IdeaLoft (YEGrb Calendar)
• Dec 13 - YEGrb meetup. We’ve loved it ahead one week to accomodate Christmas.

Jobs

• Yardstick Software is looking for a web designer

Talk (60 minutes)

Derick Bailey joined us via our new Google+ page to talk about using backbone.js and to take questions. He’s got lots more resources up available at http://backbonetraining.net/resources, and he’s posted his presentation on GitHub if you want to take another look at it.

Derick also mentioned building simple Ruby RESTful API’s using the grape gem. You can also find a list of other API builder on the Ruby Toolbox.

House Keeping

We agreed to have a meetup on Tuesday Dec 13th, 2011. Sign up to talk now!

WHAT: Meetup, Backbone.js with Derick Bailey
WHEN: Tuesday, November 15th at 18:30 - 20:00
WHERE: In person, room 2-49 in the Computing Science Centre at the University of Alberta Campus. Live online via the YEGrb Google+ Page.

We’re excited to announce that Derick Bailey will be joining us to do a short introduction to Backbone.js followed by time for questions and answers.

Backbone.js is an exciting new JavaScript MVC library. It’s small (less than 5 kb), simple, and works well with other lbiraries like jQuery. In the year since it was launched it’s gained a passionate following.

Derick Bailey is an independent consultant, developer, trainer, speaker and author, living in Waco, TX. He’s been slinging code since the late 80’s and doing it professionally since the mid 90’s. After nearly 10 years of working in .NET, Derick spends his time primarily writing ruby and javascript, while still dabbling in other bits, blogging with LosTechies.com, screencasting at WatchMeCode.net, and much more.

Derick’s most recent technical love affair is with BackboneJS and JavaScript in general. He’s been heads-down coding with them, helping out on the Backbone Google group, StackOverflow, and writing the backbone-memento and backbone.modelbinding libraries, as well as contributing back to the backbone project. He’s also a very nice guy.

We’re taking questions for Derick in advance. You can submit your own questions and vote for your favourite questions that have already been asked.

Afterwards we’ll head out for drinks at Original Joe’s Varsity.