Toledo Tech Events

Toledo needs a group that is less concentrated on a programming language, framework, or technique, and more open to new languages, frameworks and techniques. That is what Dev Toledo is all about.

We are a group of software craftsman that want to learn and share knowledge with others in the area. It doesn’t matter if you’re a .NET developer, an iOS developer, a Ruby developer, or a Front End developer. We hope you will come out and join us.

Our first meeting is November 15th at 6:30 pm @ Seed Coworking in Downtown Toledo. Scott Radcliff will discuss the new and deprecated features of Rails 4.

Follow @DevToledo on Twitter for more info.

Tech Toledo invites all information technology professionals to join us on December 13th for the 2nd Annual GeekDinner HolidayMixer. This will be the year’s largest social gathering of the IT community in the Toledo Region.

Last year’s event was a huge success: you will not want to miss this one!

The festivities start at 5:30pm on Thursday, December 13th, 2012. We are meeting at Packo’s at the Park, 7 South Superior Street, in downtown Toledo, in the Outfield room.

No RSVP is required. Just show up thirsty, with an appetite for Packo’s, money to pay for your own food and drink, and a willingness to connect with colleagues.

Many members of regional IT groups will be in attendance, holding their annual end-of-year Geek Dinners with us. Groups already confirmed include NWNUG, NWOACM, Toledo Web Professionals and Toledo CocoaHeads, with more expected to join us. You will be able to learn about each group during the event.

You are NOT required to be a member of any of these groups to attend. We welcome anyone who wants to hang out with us, such as entrepreneurs, designers, business leaders, engineers, government officials, marketing professionals. The more the merrier!

On January 17th, Jamie Wright will discuss using Passbook.

Passbook is new open standard developed by Apple which allows users to quickly access scannable barcodes and other information useful for real-world situations from their iOS devices. These situations include scanning boarding passes, redeeming coupons, or showing a membership card among other available actions.

In this session we will learn what a Passbook pass is made up of, design guidelines for a pass, and how to create a pass from within your own application. We will also touch on how these passes can be updated and what is needed to support a pass from your own server including the creation of passes and how to support push notifications. This session will show how you can interact with Passbook from your server using Ruby and how you can interact with Passbook from your iPhone applications using Passkit.

Are you tired of programming in languages from the 80’s and 90’s? Sick of the ‘slow’ performance of ‘pretty’ languages like Ruby or Python? Why not try Go?

Go is shiny new language created at Google. It’s fast, it’s functional, it can do some pretty cool stuff.

In this ‘choose your own adventure’ style talk I talk about what you want me to. Well not really… you’ll get to choose between building a command line tool with Go or building a simple, performant web application. Through building something we will explore some of the nuances of this exciting new language without the boredom of just reading the docs.

It goes without saying that this talk will not be extremely in depth and it will (hopefully) be accessible to even the newest of programmer.

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/DevToledo/events/103130302/

On March 21st at 6:30pm Matt Braun of Magnate Interactive will present on the Haxe programming language. Haxe is a multiplatform open-source programming language that can compile to JavaScript, Flash, NekoVM, PHP, C++, and C#.

With a growing number of devices to build for, this looks really interesting. We hope to you there. All are welcome.

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/DevToledo/events/107719172/

DevToledo meets on the 3rd Thursday of the month.

So what is a Raspberry Pi and what does it really do? Remember all those cool ideas you had that would never work because you had to hook up a giant computer that weighed 10 pounds? Well, that's not a problem any more. Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer that runs Linux and gives you low level I/O on a few of its connectors. Since the PI is for Python it will be the language I use for the examples. I'll show you how it works and maybe blink some lights and make something move.

Speaker: John Zalewski

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/DevToledo/events/111488062/

Join us as we all learn things that we didn't know Git could do. Magnus Stahre is a known Git expert and will present on using Git more effectively.

Everyone is welcome.

Git: http://git-scm.com/

Magnus Stahre: https://twitter.com/magnusstahre

We are doing something a little different this month. We are going to TDD a Code Kata, but with a little twist. We don't know which kata we are going to solve until the night of the event. The kata will get chosen by the attendees, and if they choose, they will help program the kata. Programming is not required to attend. Scott Radcliff, Jamie Wright, and Keith Thompson will all pair on the problem with each programmer working on it for a few minutes before the next one takes over.

This will be a crowd exercise with help from everyone on the particulars of the solution and hopefully some pairing.

If you are new to TDD, curious how others test drive their code, or are just curious about how a program gets driven by tests, this is a great opportunity.

Here is the list, if you want to browse them before hand: http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataCatalogue

On November 14th, we welcome Joe Fiorini to talk about why and how he moved away from Rail's asset pipeline and whether or not it's the right move for you. He'll go into how he replaced all the features of Sprockets with Grunt & Bower, and a brief introduction to both. Then he will show how you can have a similar setup by using Half Pipe, the asset pipeline replacement for picky front-end developers. After this talk, you will be ready to enjoy a much happier experience working on client-side code.

Speaker Bio:

Joe is a developer with the heart of a designer. He usually codes in JavaScript or Ruby, but recently has started writing Haskell as well. In addition to running his own open source projects, he has contributed to projects such as Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, Bacon.js, RSpec, GitX and more. In the evenings he can be found usability testing everything in the house with his 2 year old daughter. You can follow Joe on twitter at @joefiorini