{"id":976,"date":"2009-04-03T20:00:49","date_gmt":"2009-04-04T04:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/?p=976"},"modified":"2009-04-03T20:00:49","modified_gmt":"2009-04-04T04:00:49","slug":"sf-ruby-meetup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/2009\/04\/sf-ruby-meetup\/","title":{"rendered":"sf ruby meetup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I attended the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meetup.com\/sfruby\/calendar\/9781300\/\">March SF Ruby Meetup<\/a>.  (Some day I hope to attend a meetup where I don&#8217;t personally double the number of women, but at least I wasn&#8217;t all alone, and the guys treated me as more of a geek than a girl, which is always a good sign.)  I found the talks engaging and learned a few things.  <\/p>\n<p>There were three short talks (see notes below):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"#cellguided\">CellGuided<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#heroku\">Heroku<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#github\">GitHub<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#announce\">Announcements<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a name=\"cellguided\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<h2><a name=\"cellguided\">CellGuided<\/a><\/h2>\n<p>Rajiv Aggarwal has created a treasure hunt application <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cellguided.com\/\">Cell Guided<\/a>.  Rajiv generously shared details about what it took to build it and highlighted the various libraries and APIs he used for mapping and geo-coding.<\/p>\n<p>Geocoding using <a href=\"http:\/\/geokit.rubyforge.org\/\">GeoKit<\/a> (requires Google API Key)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> from street address: GeoKit::Geocoders::Muitgeocoder.geocode<\/li>\n<li> from ip address: GeoKit::Geocoders::IpGeocoder.geocode<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>extends ActiveRecord<\/p>\n<pre>Whatever.find(:all, :origin =&gt; [37.39, -122.39], :within =&gt; 50)\nWhatever.find(:all, :origin=&gt;'100 Spear st, San Francisco, CA', :within=&gt;10)<\/pre>\n<p>Maps using <a href=\"http:\/\/ym4r.rubyforge.org\/\">ym4r<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Displays static or dynamic maps that you can interact with. For printing, couldn&#8217;t use the same API (since sometimes the Javascript wasn&#8217;t done by the time the print happened, sometimes the map would be blank), instead using the static map API worked.<\/p>\n<p>They use a &#8216;QR code&#8217; on the flyer to encode the URL of the website.  Pretty cool.  Aside from an audience member: McDonalds in Thailand uses it on the packaging to tell you how many calories are in that food item!<\/p>\n<p>Q: How much Javascript did you have to write?  &#8220;about a page&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a name=\"heroku\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<h2><a name=\"heroku\">Heroku<\/a><\/h2>\n<p>Adam Wiggins, one of the co-founders of Heroku, demonstrated how easy it is to deploy a Ruby on Rails app to Heroku and talked about some additional neat features, as well as their (not yet final) plans for pricing the service.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> instant Ruby deployment<\/li>\n<li> deply integrated thru Ruby gem &amp; git<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>how to:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li> get heroku account<\/li>\n<li> sudo gem install heroku<\/li>\n<li> automatically adds a git remote<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>you can use your own URL if you like, but by default it will make one up for youto make it easy to experiment.\u00a0 memcahce in beta right now.\u00a0 &#8216;heroku console&#8217; will give you access to the console.\u00a0 The severs are locked down at the Unix level: filesystem is read-only now and git submodule hacks won&#8217;t work anymore.<\/p>\n<p>gem support?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>can vendor rails, but doesn&#8217;t work with binary gems<\/li>\n<li>create a .gems manifest<\/li>\n<li>coming from rubyforget, just add the name of the gem<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What if RubyForge doesn&#8217;t have it yet?<br \/>\nmy-gem &#8211;source http:\/\/mygem.myserver.com<\/p>\n<p>Rmagick? all installed, other gems that depend on OS binaries: email us<\/p>\n<p>Q: how do you get your data in and out?\u00a0 A: taps .. streaming database import\/export<\/p>\n<p>How to move data from your database to heroku&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>heroku db:push<\/p>\n<p>you can also do:<br \/>\nheroku db:pull<\/p>\n<p>backup?  EC2 &#8211; tripple re-dundant.\u00a0 You should keep your own backups, of course.\u00a0 They provide some tools. Also heroku bundle:capture<\/p>\n<p>They have tested high traffic, easy to scale, built into the architecture.\u00a0 You&#8217;ll be sharing a db on the free apps.<br \/>\nYou would pay to have a dedicated database.\u00a0 You get 1-2 mogrel\/thins for free, higher for pay.\u00a0 You could crank it up to 8 just for a day, easy command line control.\u00a0 Can you specify limits?  analogy to google ad words, set a budget&#8230; still working out the details, which is one of the reasons we aren&#8217;t publicly posting pricing.<\/p>\n<p>All 2.0 series of Rails are installed.\u00a0 If you want something else you can always vendor it.<\/p>\n<p>Uses postgres.. not mySql<\/p>\n<h2><a name=\"github\">GitHub<\/a><\/h2>\n<p>Chris Wanstrath from <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/\">GitHub<\/a> gave an entertaining and detailed talk about the lesser known features of github.  I was one of 2-3 people in the audience (of about 60-70) who raised their hands in answer to the question &#8220;who doesn&#8217;t have a github account?&#8221;  Sitting near the front Chris challenged me to tell him what I didn&#8217;t like about GitHub.  I had no gripes about the site, but hadn&#8217;t seen a reason to use github and had merely set up a remote repository on a dev server when needed to collaborate.  Of course later in the week I realized I did have a GitHub account, I just wasn&#8217;t using it for posting.  There&#8217;s probably no way you can write Ruby on Rails code for even just a few months and not have *some* reason to have an account on GitHub.  After hearing Chris&#8217; talk, I did have second thoughts about not using GitHub for my shared git repository.  GitHub seems well-worth the price of admission with cool features for collaborating on shared code.   Here are some highlights:<\/p>\n<p>Cool visualizations<br \/>\n(click on the images to link to the live graphs)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Punch Card&#8221; graph, commit activity by day and hour:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/github.com\/defunkt\/github-gem\/graphs\/punch_card\"><img src=\"http:\/\/img.skitch.com\/20090404-cinaf3y46et54prptu47gkcngn.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Blocks represent &#8220;impact&#8221;. Impact is (lines added + lines deleted) for all non-merge commits during a week period.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/github.com\/defunkt\/github-gem\/graphs\/impact\"><img src=\"http:\/\/img.skitch.com\/20090404-fd8as1kwuc214fn7ff7e27mt7f.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Network Graph Viewer<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/github.com\/defunkt\/github-gem\/network\"><img src=\"http:\/\/img.skitch.com\/20090404-6uwjqc9cspcrxg36yk7yxpjji.jpg\" alt=\"The github-gem Network - GitHub\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>They also use rubanalytics to create a <a href=\"http:\/\/github.com\/defunkt\/github-gem\/graphs\/traffic\">view of page traffic<\/a> (based on the google analytics they were already using for githb).<\/p>\n<p>Looking at source code&#8230;<br \/>\nshift-select &#8211; highlight a section of code and send a URL<br \/>\nl &amp; h, key nav for pagination<br \/>\non commits page, j &amp; k, c for commit<\/p>\n<p>on a commit&#8230; on the URL, add .patch or .diff<br \/>\ncan wget the .patch, can apply it<\/p>\n<p>Fork Queue &#8212; I guess only admins have it<\/p>\n<p>They have a bug tracker in development.  Lightweight, simple priority, modeled after gmail, same keyboard shortcuts.<\/p>\n<p>Chris talked in detail about various implementations of a &#8220;job queue,&#8221; apiece of work that can be done in the background by a persistent worker.  Nice presso, sorry no notes.  Heroku doesn&#8217;t support this yet&#8230; working on it.  Noted &#8220;workling&#8221; an emerging Rails plugin.<\/p>\n<p>Odd langugage quote of the evening &#8220;We didn&#8217;t have to tie up the mongrel&#8221; (to a different audience this would mean something quite different!)<\/p>\n<h2><a name=\"announce\">Announcements<\/a><\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.codecon.org\/2009\/\">CodeCon<\/a> &#8211; unconference, for hackers by hackers<br \/>\nApril 17-18<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I attended the March SF Ruby Meetup. (Some day I hope to attend a meetup where I don&#8217;t personally double the number of women, but at least I wasn&#8217;t all alone, and the guys treated me as more of a geek than a girl, which is always a good sign.) I found the&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/2009\/04\/sf-ruby-meetup\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultrasaurus.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}