Refresh Savannah

Brad Taylor from Rails Machine is going to speak at March’s Refresh (3/16 @ 7PM)! This is great news for everyone, because Brad’s about as smart as they come. He’s going to share the talk he gave at last year’s Geekend, which was awesome. If you missed it, you should come check it out. If you didn’t, you should come anyway since I’m sure Brad will have some new stuff to say and the discussion will be interesting as usual. Here’s Brad’s description:

Being a geek is only half the story. Although our passion and intensity drives our work and interests, we can often be uncomfortable in environments that may come more naturally to non-geeks. This talks explores how to push beyond your comfort zone by exploring new skills and hobbies.

I think we’ll have March’s Refresh at the Music Intelligence office, just to spice things up. We’re at 208 E Broughton St right downtown. Be there at 7PM on 3/16 for some good geeky camaraderie!

A big thank you to Jim Goodlett who gave a really interesting presentation this month, and to everyone who showed up! The discussion was amazing and I had a lot of fun.

I know I said I thought I had someone lined up for March, but it turns out… I don’t! So, we need someone to step up to speak at March’s Refresh. You can speak about pretty much anything you want as long as you can somehow connect it to being geeky (and really, if you’re into something enough to volunteer to speak about it, you’re geeky enough). I’m going to reach out to some potential victims in the meantime, but I’d love it if someone volunteered!

If you’re interested, shoot me an e-mail (kevin-at-lawver.net) and let me know the topic, a description and anything else you want to tell me about your proposed topic. Also, be sure you’re available to speak at 7PM on 3/16, because that’s when the next meeting is!

Update: Since we have 3 votes for the SEDA board room, 4 votes for MIS and one vote against MIS, we’re going to stick with the SEDA board room this month. So… I hope to see all of you there on 2/16 @ 7PM! If you’ve never been to the SEDA building before, they have directions on their site. I hope to see you all there!

February is coming up, so it’s time to get the word out about February’s Refresh Savannah!! Since last month’s meeting had to be canceled, we’re trying the same topic again… Jim Goodlett’s going to speak about KPI (key performance indicators) and all their power. This should be a really interesting talk and hopefully inspire some folks to consider striking out on their own.

I’ve been thinking about Refresh and where it should go. I’ve heard from several people that driving across the bridge to the SEDA building could be dampening attendance, so here’s a poll. Please fill it out and I’ll figure out where we’re going to hold February’s Refresh. It’ll either be at the SEDA building as usual, or we’ll have it at the Music Intelligence office. It’s a smaller space, but we’re right downtown and there’s ice cream downstairs. It honestly doesn’t matter to me. I want Refresh to work for the people who want to attend, without being a giant time suck for me. So, let me know your preference. Either way, we’ll be meeting at 7:00PM on February 16th! I’ll update this post with the location later.

Another Update We’re just going to cancel January’s Refresh and Jim is going to speak in February (I’m bringing a backup presentation just in case). So, instead of going to Refresh next Tuesday, why don’t you find something you don’t know but have always wanted to learn, do some research and then tell us about it!

Urgent Update and Call for Help! Our speaker has another engagement that night that he can’t get out of, so we need to find either a new speaker for Tuesday night or cancel.  If you’d like to speak on something web-related (you won’t find a friendlier audience, I promise), please e-mail me (kevin-at-lawver.net) with a brief intro, and what you want to talk about!  If no one volunteers, we’ll cancel this month’s meeting and get back together in February.

It’s a new year and time to get back into the Refresh groove.  To start us off this year, Jim Goodlett’s going to speak about KPI (key performance indicators) and all their power. This should be a really interesting talk and hopefully inspire some folks to consider striking out on their own.

I hope to see you there!  Be sure to tell your friends about it, as this one isn’t quite as nerdy as some of our previous talks.

I’m going to skip the Upcoming stuff, since no one ever RSVP’s.  But, the details are the same other than that:

• What: Refresh Savannah January: Definining a Problem to Build Your Business Around
• When: January 19th, 7PM
• Where: The SEDA Board Room (directions below)

Directions to the SEDA Building, again courtesy of Fitz.

1. After crossing the Talmadge Bridge from the Savannah side, exit at Hutchinson Island/Convention Center.
2. Stay in the right lane but veer left at fork onto Wayne Shackelford Blvd.
3. Make first right turn on Hugh Tracy Blvd.
4. Continue straight and turn left into SEDA Building parking lot.

SCAD just redesigned their website and Janna DeVylder was in the middle of the whole thing. She and her team will give us a view into how they did it, the design choices they had to make and how they went about making them.

I’m really looking forward to this. Everyone has a different process for thinking about this stuff, and it’s rare to get people willing to talk about it in-depth. So, buckle up, this should be a fun one!

When: 10/20 @ 7PM
Where: The SEDA Building

More details are on the Upcoming event page, and you can grab directions to the SEDA building from last month’s event post. Please RSVP if you’re coming!

Please help spread the word! We had pretty dismal attendance last month. There have got to be more than six people in Savannah interested in this stuff.

And just so no one’s confused, we won’t be having Refresh in November or December (unless someone else wants to organize them). I’ll most likely be out of town for both dates. We’ll pick back up in January – and Jim Goodlett’s already volunteered to present!

There are Murray’s slides, and he would also like you to watch this documentary on e-waste.

Big thanks to Murray for presenting – now, who wants to speak in October?

September’s Refresh is quickly approaching! It’s on the Tuesday 9/15 @ 7PM at the SEDA Building again (directions below).

Murray runs AWOL Inc’s computer “repurposing” project and is doing some really interesting stuff with old PC’s, open source and volunteer labor. He’s going to tell us a bit about the program, how we can get involved, and we’ll hopefully have time to brainstorm a bit about cool apps we could contribute as the local tech community. It should be a lot of fun!

As usual, please RSVP and I hope to see you there!

Directions to the SEDA Building, again courtesy of Fitz.

1. After crossing the Talmadge Bridge, exit at Hutchinson Island/Convention Center.
2. Stay in the right lane but veer left at fork onto Wayne Shackelford Blvd.
3. Make first right turn on Hugh Tracy Blvd.
4. Continue straight and turn left into SEDA Building parking lot.

As you can see, there are the slides. This post will also contain all the links we talk about tonight, so check back tomorrow!

Here are the links from the slides and the gems I talk about:

• Example Sites:
  • uPlaya – My day job. Handles tens of thousands of requests a day on two tiny Amazon EC2 instances. Could probably do it all on one, but we like redundancy
  • Ficly – Art project done with Jason Garber. Handles tens of thousands of requests a day on a single server hosted over at Seimitsu. Even with memcached, MySQL, Apache + Passenger all on the same box, we’re using less than three gb of RAM out of eight.
• Books and Help:
  • Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition – The best book to learn Rails with, period
  • rdoc.info – A lot of gem documentation all in one place.
  • Rails API Documentation – All the Rails classes and methods in one place. Can be a little daunting when you’re starting out, so start with the Agile Web book first.
• Scale Helpers:
  • Phusion Passenger
  • Ruby Enterprise Edition
  • memcached
• Ruby-based Alternatives:
  • Camping
  • Sinatra
  • webby
  • Halcyon
• Gems!
  • First, add github’s gem repository: gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
  • Pagination: mislav-will_paginate
  • Faster URLs: pauldix-typhoeus
  • Twitterness: hayesdavis-grackle
  • Faster XML or HTML parsing: nokogiri or hpricot
• Rails Plugins FTW!
  • cache-money: a write-through cache for ActiveRecord.
  • attachment_fu: great for handling uploads and storing them on s3
  • smurf: automatic minification of javascript and css
  • openid_enabled: just what it says, painless OpenId.

Since Ron asked so nicely, I’m going to do an introduction to Ruby on Rails for August’s Refresh. The presentation tries not to assume anything about the audience, so it should be suitable for just about any level of experience with programming languages or frameworks (meaning – you don’t have to know anything about programming to get something out of it). Most of the presentation is a live coding demo, which is always a lot of fun (it’s like magic).

If you’re planning on coming, please RSVP again.

Details:

• When: August 18 @ 7PM
• Where: SEDA Board Room (directions to the SEDA building below)
• What: An Introduction to Ruby on Rails… redundant, I know

Directions to the SEDA Building, again courtesy of Fitz.

1. After crossing the Talmadge Bridge, exit at Hutchinson Island/Convention Center.
2. Stay in the right lane but veer left at fork onto Wayne Shackelford Blvd.
3. Make first right turn on Hugh Tracy Blvd.
4. Continue straight and turn left into SEDA Building parking lot.

I hope to see you there!

Oh and one more thing – how many refreshers are on twitter? I am, and I know Dale, Leigh and a few others are. Are you? Post a comment with a link to your twitter accout and I’ll start a list in the blogroll.

Remember, this Tuesday (7/21) at 7PM, in the SEDA Board Room, we’re having our July meeting! I just got an e-mail from Janna and the title of this month’s presentation is: You don’t have to be called DESIGNER to think & act like one!!

See the previous post for all the gory details, and I hope to see you there!

Update: And here are the slides from July’s meeting. Thanks to Susan and Janna for presenting!!