July's SFRuby meetup will be at Context Optional on July 21. Context Optional has also generously offered to provide food and drink.

These are the presentations we will be having:

Agile Development: Alon Salant and Christian Nelson from Carbon Five

Agile software development provides a number of discrete practices to
help you be a better programmer and a great provider of programming
services to your clients, internal or external to your business. The
continuous daily rigor of testing, refactoring, pairing and
integrating is a great path to producing quality software. The process
of defining short development iterations with regular delivery and
review with your client encourages collaboration and ensures that you
are defining and meeting expectations along the way. We'll describe
the agile development and planning practices that we have found to be
most effective in our work over the last 10 years and hope to hear from
the group what is working for you.

What every Ruby programmer should know about threads: Caleb Clausen

Threads are the most common way to add parallelism to your program, but it
seems that few rubyists really understand them well. I would like to change
that in this talk. I hope the listener will come away with a deeper
understanding of threads and thread synchronization: a true mastery of the
concepts involved in threaded programming. I'll also do some ranting about
thread APIs that I consider poorly designed.

Metaprogramming in Ruby: it's everywhere: Alex Koppel

If you're using a Ruby library -- Rails, will_paginate, RSpec and Shoulda, and many, many more -- you're taking advantage of metaprogramming; chances are good you've used it in your own code. So what exactly is metaprogramming? How should we use it to make our programs more powerful and easier to maintain? Just as importantly, how can we avoid abusing metaprogramming to make our programs brittle or difficult to understand? In this talk, we'll take a journey through metaprogramming techniques and principles, covering the pros and cons of each with examples drawn from a variety of Ruby projects.

After Context Optional kicks us out, we'll meet at John Collins bar for beers and more talk:

138 Minna St
(at New Montgomery St)
San Francisco, CA 94105