As I said last night, we don’t have a speaker for February yet, so if you’re interested in speaking, please come forward! If you’ve already agreed to speak in February, and I’ve forgotten, please remind me (and thank you).

And I also asked you guys what you wanted to hear in 2012, so, here’s a poll you can do to tell me (you can choose up to 3):

I’ll hopefully be back in a couple weeks to tell you what’s coming up in February. Stay tuned…

If you’re reading this in the e-mail, you’re gonna have to go to the site to see the slides (trust me, they’re worth it). A huge thank you to Steven Scarborough and Billy Steele for presenting and for James and Phillip for showing up and sharing their perspective as the “clients” (and for bringing the coffee, which smelled awesome).

We don’t have a speaker for July, and that’s kind of OK with me. July is going to be crazy-busy for me and though Refresh doesn’t take that much time to organize, one less thing to worry about is welcome at this point. If you’d like to speak in July, let me know and we can do something, but as of now, we’ll be taking a break for July.

In August, we’ll have another design-related thing. The guys from Unmatched Style are coming down from South Carolina to give us some design/development-related talks! I’m not sure exactly what they’ll be talking about, but I’ll post a separate announcement when I get the details from them.

There are the slides from last night. Thanks to everyone who came out and contributed to a great discussion! And be on the look out for the announcement about December’s Refresh… it’s going to have something to do with a phenomenon called “LOLs”. Or so I hear.

If you missed this month, here’s the video of Dr. Scott’s presentation from TEDx Creative Coast:

And remember, next month we’re going to try starting at 6PM instead of 7. Next month’s presentation will be on “innovation” by Ron Pearl! I hope to see you all there (9/21 – 6PM at ThincSpace)!

Thanks to everyone who came out, and especially Marvin for presenting. I thought it went really well and think everyone got something out of it.

Stay tuned for details on August’s Refresh, which will hopefully be a mashup of Savannah’s medical and web communities to see if we can help save some lives. Sounds interesting, right?

Kevin Johnson posted several links to Twitter last night about angel funding and the “veil piercing” he mentioned:

• Capital One Reports Business Debt on Personal Credit Reports
• Business debts showing up on personal credit reports
• Find an Angel Investor Before You Need One

Farmville and game theory came up. I learned pretty much everything I know about game and learning theory from Kathy Siera’s blog and her presentations at SxSW. Another great introduction to game theory is Jane McGonigal’s excellent TED talk. Phil mentioned the Skinner Box as well… I’m not sure Farmville is exactly a Skinner Box, but he may be on to something.

And now for the request. We had some new folks there last night, and that was great, but I’m having a hard time getting the word out (I am a geek not a marketer). If you know someone who you think could get something out of Refresh Savannah, please tell them. Refresh groups work best when there’s a good mix of skills (not that we don’t have that already, but we are a bit geek-heavy), and I’d love to see more designers, marketing folks (but not too many, I’m allergic), project managers and other disciplines in the mix! So, please help me spread the word and let’s see what we can turn this into!

We’ve got some great topics coming up in the next three months (yes, I can’t believe it either, we have the next three months lined up): agile development, ideation and the problem with hospitals and innovation. I’ll post more about them each when they get closer!

Also, if there are topics you’d like to learn more about or better yet, present to the group, please either post a comment or send me an e-mail (kevin@lawver.net)!

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?

• 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.

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!!

Details:

• What: Refresh Savannah’s July Meeting – Something Designish
• Who: Janna DeVylder and Susan Isaacs
• When: July 21, 2009 at 7PM
• Where: The SEDA Board Room: 131 Hutchinson Island Road, 4th Floor

Directions, courtesy of Fitz Haile:

From Downtown Savannah (new building, and not on Google Maps yet)…

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 all there!

(and if you’d like to get these posts via e-mail, I added a link to the groovy feedburner subscribe via e-mail thing in the sidebar)