Refresh Savannah

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.