June Meeting - Building high-performance APIs for the video game industry with Goliath, Grape, and EventMachine

Texan Rubyists (and welcome visitors),

Our next meeting will be Monday, June 3rd, from 7:00-9:00pm at Capital Factory downtown. Our talk will be from Matt Patterson

Synopsis

The video game industry frequently tests the limits of web- and service-oriented architectures. Poor-performing launches, like SimCity and Diablo 3, have made it clear that gamers expect fast, responsive services if we're going to make games that are in constant communication with centralized data networks. Having infrastructure out-of-the-gate that's quick, scalable, and tunable is a must. This talk is a brief delve into the non-blocking Ruby web framework, Goliath, and how we're using it at Gearbox Software to power numerous APIs in a service-oriented infrastructure that ties together Gearbox's game titles, players, social outreach, and internal stakeholders.

Bio

Matt Paterson has been building web applications since 1998, when he started with ColdFusion and PHP. In 2006 he started learning Ruby and playing with the then-1.0 Rails framework. Over the past 7 years, Matt has worked with a variety of Austin startups and established companies, spanning the gamut from hardware developers to network security to corporate intranet apps to data mining. Today, he operates as a full-time independent software consultant, with a focus on troubled codebase refactoring, and on building high-performance Ruby-based software to solve challenging infrastructure problems. He also consults on team-building, Agile process, and UI development with responsive, semantic CSS and HTML5. Outside of his role as a software engineer, Matt is a published author, with two horror novels on the shelves and a sci-fi adventure out later this year. He blogs (infrequently) about software at http://code.digimonkey.com, and about writing and his novels at http://mepatterson.net.

Kata

Afterwards, we will pair up and work on a Kata.

Beers and socialization practice to follow at HandleBar on 5th street.

Location

Thanks again to Capital Factory for providing the space for this month’s meeting! You can find them on the 16th floor of the Austin Centre business tower, downtown at 701 Brazos Street.

We’ll see y’all there!