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!

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?

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.

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!!

We’ve got thirty votes on the poll and The Social Media Food Chain is far enough in the lead that I’m going to go ahead and close the poll (Sodahead isn’t letting me close the poll, so vote all you want, it’s not changing anything) and say that I’ll be doing a presentation titled The Social Media Food Chain on 5/19 at 7PM here at Music Intelligence Solutions (208 E Broughton St). If you’re planning, thinking about, or just pondering the possibility of coming, please please please RSVP on the Upcoming page so we have some idea of how many people will be invading our office.

I know the title is somewhat vague, and I haven’t really written the presentation yet, but the topic was inspired by a presentation I gave in London in January and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I don’t plan on it being overly technical, just a look at the social web and how things go from idea to product, how people use them and the ecosystems that sprout up around them. That will probably change a bit as I work on it, but that’s the goal.

So, you don’t need to be a geek or developer for this one. All you need is a healthy curiosity about the web, some familiarity with a social network like facebook, twitter or flickr and be willing to show up!