Ruby on Rails/EC2 Talk at Chicago Code Camp

I presented a talk called Building and Deploying a Ruby on Rails Application on Amazon EC2 at the first Chicago Code Camp at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, IL on Saturday May 30, 2009.

In the talk, I did a brief overview of the popular web framework Ruby on Rails and then a quick overview of Amazon’s cloud computing platform EC2. Given that Code Camp aims to be a code-heavy and Powerpoint-light conference, I spent a majority of my 75 minutes building a real Rails app and deploying it to EC2. I showed the power of convention over configuration, Active Record, deployment with Capistrano, database migrations, and other pieces of the Rails stack. (Projector woes prevented me from being as productive as I would have liked … but I still successfully got a brand new app deployed in the cloud via a 3G wireless card!)

My slides are available here: rails-and-ec2-rob-lambert.ppt

The code developed at the talk can be found at the following Subversion URL: http://subversion.assembla.com/svn/zabada_public/codecampbook/ (see the README for quick steps on deploying this example to EC2)

Thanks to the Chicago Code Camp folks putting on a great event!