Rails - Feb 2006 - Calgary Ruby Users Society (CRUSERS)

Calgary Ruby Users Society (otherwise known as Association of Anonymous 
Java Programmers, Calgary branch) had it''s first meeting today. After a
round of introductions, we discussed our interests and brainstormed 
possible activities for the group. Paul Rogers did a presentation on 
Watir [http://wtr.rubyforge.org/]. Watir is not just a great tool, but 
also a way to sneak Ruby into your day job. ThoughtWorks Canada bought 
the donuts.

 From now on, we are planning to meet once a month, generally on the 
third Tuesday. Our next meeting will be in the second half of March 
(date TBD), most probably a joint meeting with CJUG (Calgary Java Users 
Group). The subject of the meeting will be Rails (but of course!)

So, if you like Ruby and live in Calgary, you are most welcome to join us.
Please subscribe to CRUSERS Yahoo Group: 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crusers/
And once you subscribe, consider posting an introductory message, 
describing your programming background, how do you use Ruby, and what 
would you like to do in CRUSERS.

Best regards,
Alex Verkhovsky

You know how in Canada (or maybe just Vancouver) there''s these hotdog
stands
named "Mr. Tubesteak."?

Yeah, CRUSERS and Mr. Tubesteak are both really really bad names for things
to Americans.  :-)

Actual useful comments below...

On 2/23/06 12:30 AM, "Alexey Verkhovsky" <alex@verk.info> wrote:
> Calgary Ruby Users Society (otherwise known as Association of Anonymous
> Java Programmers, Calgary branch) had it''s first meeting today.
After a
> round of introductions, we discussed our interests and brainstormed
> possible activities for the group. Paul Rogers did a presentation on
> Watir [http://wtr.rubyforge.org/]. Watir is not just a great tool, but
> also a way to sneak Ruby into your day job. ThoughtWorks Canada bought
> the donuts.
>
Watir is the bomb I must say.  We used it today to debug a load problem on
our portal server (yeah, don''t ask).  We just took a script we were
using
for testing and ran it un 500 threads.  Kept doing that until our fixes
stopped the portal from crashing.

Great stuff.

Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/

Zed Shaw wrote:
>Yeah, CRUSERS and Mr. Tubesteak are both really really bad names for things
>to Americans.  :-)
>  
>
Note how the people coming up with this name were Canadians, not 
Americans. :)
>Watir is the bomb I must say.  We used it today to debug a load problem on
>our portal server (yeah, don''t ask).  We just took a script we were
using
>for testing and ran it un 500 threads.  Kept doing that until our fixes
>stopped the portal from crashing.
>  
>
Heh... Watir can be used for all sorts of things other than functional 
test automation.

Once, I''ve seen somebody using it for data migration. Assumption was,
if
you enter your legacy data through your new application GUI, you get 
less work to do and more confidence in the integrity of your migrated 
data. Of course, it was quite slow, but in that particular case slow was OK.

Alex