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6:30 pm – This month‘s meetup will begin with casual time to meet fellow Refresh members. Feel free to BYOB and spark up conversation with your peers.
7:00 pm – Using CSS image sprites can greatly improve your site‘s responsiveness by reducing the amount of requests to the server. They can be, however, incredibly annoying to create and maintain. Colin Harris will give a 10 minute lightning talk on why you should be using sprites, and how his useful Ruby library takes the pain out of the process.
7:20 pm – As web developers, we work with relational databases everyday. MySQL, the workhorse of the Internet, has taught us think about our data in terms of relationships. But sometimes our data doesn‘t fit neatly into this model — sometimes foreign keys and mapping tables just aren‘t the best way. Apache CouchDB is a different kind of database. It‘s document-oriented and it‘s built for the web. Jeff Siarto will talk about the concepts behind CouchDB including REST, JSON and available Ruby and Javascript client libraries. He‘ll also discuss the differences between document-based and relational databases and introduce you to the CouchDB web interface.
8:10 pm – For the second month in a row, we plan to wrap up the event with a site critique. This is a highly interactive, rapid-fire segment led by different web professional each month. We rely on your suggestions in deciding which site to review, so please leave a comment on the Meetup event page with a URL. The leader will choose one site from the suggestions and prepare a few notes ahead of time to guide the group. It should be a great analytical segue to more conversation and drinks
after the meetup, so stick around!
 
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