KCDC 2014 Session Proposal

learning_rails.md

Learning Rails for Fun and Nonprofit

There are a lot of nonprofits that need help building websites. While wordpress may suffice for many of these organizations, some have requirements that are better suited to an actual website. With free/cheap tools like Heroku and other database/logging services, quickly building a website that meets a nonprofit’s needs is very approachable. This is the perfect type project for learning Ruby on Rails.

In this session, Scott will talk about the benefits of using a Nonprofit web project to learn Rails and what he learned while building LoveKC.org. While this is not an in-depth introduction to Rails, expect to learn about various aspects of getting started with Rails like setting up user authentication and roles, geocoding, search with elasticsearch, mailings (Mailchimp and Mandrill), and image upload/manipulation. This is a good equipping session, showing you not only what is possible with Rails, but also how to start the journey yourself.

solr_vs_elasticsearch.md

Solr vs. Elasticsearch

When it comes to adding search to an application of any sort, one will most likely use some project that is based on Lucene. Apache Lucene is the ubitquitous open source indexing and search technology. Lucene is a Java project, so it can be embedded, but most will prefer a REST interface to interact with a search server using the language of their choice. Solr and Elasticsearch are two such open source search servers that provide a REST interface to index and search with Lucene as well as many other features. Since they share the same Lucene core, Solr and Elasticsearch provide a lot of similar features but there are several diferentiating features in each.

In this session, Scott will talk about the major differences (such as distributed search, querying, schema, management, enterprise support, and community) between Solr and Elasticsearch and the tasks that each project is best suited. Expect to better understand how each project would be best suited for your use-case. Bring your questions and your own particular situation.

Scott has a lot of experience using Solr at Softek in the past two years. Since then he has been keeping an eye on Elasticsearch as it has matured.

Not sure if this is about Rails or about building solutions for non-profits.

I'm a dev picking sessions, is this going to give me an intro to Rails?

Just not sure who the audience is.

Heroku is going to get rid of their free plan. FYI.

Thanks @wesgarrison