This month's venue is at Particle - http://www.particlebr... - 360 Ritch St. Turns out Particle can hold a lot more attendees than I'd realized, so the RSVP limit is now doubled.

Props to techVenture - http://techventure.co... - they're providing munchies & bevs.

SCHEDULE

• 6:00-6:15 - Folks get settled in, introductions, & various organization news
  
• 6:15-6:30 - Particle
  
• 6:30-7:00 - "Cache Money" by Wolfram Arnold
  
• 7:00-7:15 - break
  
• 7:15-7:45 - "NewsForWhatYouDo" by Logan Henriquez
  
• 7:45-8:00 - break
  
• 8:00-8:30 - "Custom Rails Caching Framework" by Emmett Shear
  
• 8:30-8:45 - clean up
  
• 8:45-???? - District, a pub around the corner - http://www.districtsf...
  

Cache Money by Wolfram Arnold

"Cache Money is a new model caching framework for Active Record that transparently stores, synchronizes and expires model instances in memcached, through Active Record callbacks. It's a framework that provides almost all the pieces of transparently turning an application without model caching into one with model caching at the flip of a switch. In this presentation I'll show what the framework delivers, its limitation and what problems to watch out for when putting it in as drop-in intermediary for your database connection."

NewsForWhatYouDo.com by Logan Henriquez
Building a distributed application using Ruby on Rails

NewsForWhatYouDo.com is a social news web site built in Rails using a distributed architecture. This presentation will introduce the site and its architecture, then review how the code was organized to share functionality between different processes. Next several plugins will be reviewed that were helpful in enabling the application move toward being distributed. The plugins include the following:

• UseUUID: introduces UUIDs and schema-less attributes into models.
  
• acts_as_distributed: replicates changes to Rails models into a queue so they can be consumed by other processes that need to maintain an "eventually consistent" view of the data.
  

Custom Rails Caching Framework by Emmett Shear

Emmett Shear is CTO of Justin.tv and he will speak on the Justin.tv custom caching framework that they use in Rails, and the need for macros in Ruby.

"In large web applications, you are likely to have several different caching systems for various layers and complex dependencies. Remembering to explicitly expire all cache keys dependent on a given domain object when you update is error-prone; this led to a large number of bugs in our application. Running code at compile time is often enabled in Ruby via meta-programming, but traditional meta-programming techniques are not well suited to this issue. I implemented a domain specific version of macros for Ruby to solve this problem."

Contact me if you want to give a Presentation or a Lightning Talk.