I think it'd be cool to have a What's New in Rubyland monthly talk to go over things like:

* new gem releases
* developments in Rails, Merb, et al
* interesting tools and sites
* funny shit

This is essentially an offshoot of Hack Night. We break into teams and pick bugs or feature requests from some popular OSS project. Many of these are small and could be fixed in a couple hours by a team of smart hackers.

Fix a bug, have fun with fellow Ruby hackers, and become a contributing member of the OSS community. What's not to like?

The Ruby eigenclass and the klass chain is what powers much of the ruby language, including class methods, singleton methods, mixins, and ordinary class inheritance. I wonder what percentage of the group knows this stuff backwards and forwards, versus what percentage would really like to spend some time understanding it and discussing it.

Scaling war stories from the "real world".

Metaprogramming is awesome and Ruby is great at it. This is one out of a few topics that I am curious how much of the meetup attendees have totally mastered. Would most members consider this basic, or is there a sizable portion of the group that has not fully mastered this and would love some time to talk through examples, ask questions, etc.

This was an idea suggested last time we had a little AtlRUG meta chat.

Some one who knows it pretty well should do a talk on Active Merchant

Instead of "Pair Programming" where its you and one other... Collaborative Programming at ATLRUG could work like this:

* Presenter brings requirements for building an application
* Presenter is the heads down programmer
* Audience provides input (guidance, code snippets, reference links, etc.) to help speed up the development
* Audience can communicate with presenter verbally, via IM, email, google docs, etc.
* Audience see presenter code the app from start to finish

Pick a GOF design pattern each week :
* fascade
* bridge
* decorator
* etc...

- Describe (preferably with diagrams) the patterns purpose
- Demo Ruby code implementing the pattern
- Ask audience for their experiences using that pattern

I set out to find out when / where / what time? the meeting was. Perhaps you could put this info on the home page.

Someone suggested that we make Katas a regular part of the meetups.

Katas are similar to the sparring matches in karate training.

It sounds interesting, but I don't really have an accurate idea of how this would work. I'd like to see some clarification of what exactly this would look like, but I think it's an interesting concept.

i think we need a talk, from some one that has used it a bit, about new stuff in 1.9.1

would be nice if some one, who has used it a good bit, would talk about new stuff in Rails 2.3