April Meeting: State Machines & Git

[Nick Plante]

Holy crap! It’s April already. And that means that it’s time to
announce the next NH.rb!

IMPORTANT: Please note that we’re deviating from the regular meeting
time this month due to scheduling conflicts; therefore we’ll be doing
the meetup on the fourth Thursday of the month (that is, April 30th)
rather than the usual third Thursday.

Our first talk will be presented by our good pal Russ “CodeOfficer”
Jones. Russ will be dishing on finite state machines; specifically
he’ll be talking about when, where, and why you should use them in
your model code, and the libraries you can use to get up and running
with minimal effort:

Russ says: "State Machines are a useful design pattern in any
language, and in Ruby they are super easy to implement. State_Machine
and Acts_As_State_Machine (AASM) both help ease the pain of
implementation and provide some amazing features. In this
presentation, I’ll cover some basic aspects of the pattern and talk a
bit about both plugins. I’ll also demonstrate where state machines
were useful in my own applications, and some of the cool things you
can do with them."

Next, visiting Git scholar Nick Quaranto, the guy behind badass tips
site Git Ready (http://gitready.com), will treat us to an overview to
the Git version control system and review workflow strategies for
effective use in your Ruby projects (or otherwise):

Nick says: "Learn the basics of using the Git distributed version
control system, from the ground up to how you can integrate it into
your own projects. We’ll go through the concepts behind the system,
how some of the internals work, and an overview of commonly used
commands. Finally, you’ll learn how you can use Git to collaborate
with others, be it a team building a Rails project or publishing a
RubyGem to the open source world."

So yeah, this is going to be a pretty good one. You’d be a fool to
miss it. Srsly. Plus, Engine Yard will be providing pizza for us.
Please visit the blog at http://nhruby.org for directions and other
information. If you plan to attend, leaving a comment on the blog is
recommended -- it helps us ballpark the amount of food to order.

Thanks!

..nap