MEETING: Tuesday, Nov 3rd, 6-10pm at New Relic

[Kirsten Comandich]

[ Add this event to your calendar: http://calagator.org/events/1250468803 ]

Greetings! We have a meeting next week!

Presentations at 7pm

No one is scheduled yet, so -- Do you have an idea for a presentation or lightning talk? Perhaps a group discussion about the latest things people have been working on in Ruby? We'd like to hear from you!

Lightning Talks ⚡

There will be a whiteboard to sign up on arrival (first come first serve). Please don't use the permanent markers on the New Relic wall this time. ;)

We'll have pizza, snacks & beer starting at 6pm, so stop by early if you want to have dinner and socialize before the presentations.

Thank you to New Relic for providing the venue and beer, pizza & snacks this month! New Relic's meeting space is on the 29th floor of the US Bank tower, 111 SW 5th Avenue, Suite 2900, Portland, Oregon 97204. The elevators should be unlocked after 6pm.

See you there!

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The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland Oregon area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses. Meetings are usually on the first Tuesday of the month.

http://pdxruby.org/

[Kirsten Comandich]

Our meeting is tonight! We have Brent and Jason giving talks, and time for lightning talks afterwards.

Brent Miller - How does New Relic build software? A biological approach to architecture
When building resilient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems, we focus quite a bit on the particular technologies involved. Can it scale horizontally? Is Samza better than Storm? Is this library thread-safe? It turns out that, even though those questions matter to the stability of the system, they don’t matter as much as the people building the system. Humans choose the stack, write the code, and write the bugs, too. They create the weird edge cases that cause the system to fall over at the worst time.

At New Relic we’ve taken an unusual approach to building software: we draw heavily from biological metaphors like mutation and natural selection, and focus on a human-centric approach to define our architecture. Rather than trust a few armchair architects to make the decisions, we put the power in the hands of the teams wrestling with the code. We have many strategies to ensure cohesiveness across the architecture and scalability for the business, the engineering organization, and the software, but it takes a little leap of faith and a lot of trust to move to a process like ours.

I’ll share how our process works, and how we manage the growth without going off the rails, while increasing system stability

Jason Clark - Peeking into Ruby: Tracing Running Code
Your Ruby app is in production, but something isn’t quite right. It worked locally, it passed CI… why’s the running app acting weird?

If this sounds familiar, you’re in luck. Multiple tools exist for grappling with a running Ruby app. This talk will introduce a variety of tools and techniques for peeking into what your Ruby app is doing. From Ruby-level method tracing using rbtrace, all the way down to watching kernel syscalls with strace, you can see what your app is doing, and I’ll show you how.

Don’t let your production system go unwatched!