The May 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. Registration details are given below.
Agenda
Ruby’s bin men: a closer look at the garbage collector
Elise Huard is going to give us a version of the talk she has proposed for EuRuKo 2012:
The Garbage Collector: how does it work?
What does it mean when people speak about stop-the-world,
mark-and-sweep, generational garbage collectors?
How does ruby fare at collecting its own garbage?
What does it mean when they say 1.9.3’s garbage collector has improved?
This talk will explain those concepts, what the impact of garbage
collection is on our programs, and what future could be.
This description is taken from her pull request on EuRuKo’s github-based cfp. If you like her talk, or have any comments, feel free to get involved over there to let the EuRuKo organisers know that they should select it.
Dependency Injection, the Dependency Inversion Principle, and You
Tom Stuart is also going to give us a version of his EuRuKo proposal:
It’s received wisdom that Ruby doesn’t need dependency injection
frameworks. In this talk, I’ll claim that this is at least in
part because we don’t apply the Dependency Inversion Principle
properly. I’ll explore the intent of the principle, its benefits
for maintainable and testable code, and show how to improve
existing code through its application.
I’ll then go on to explore how to create objects with dependencies
wired in, hoping to settle the question of whether we need a framework to do this.
Tom’s talk is also available for discussion on the EuRuKo gothub-based CFP. Comments, notes, etc.. should go there if you have them.
Pub
After the talks we continue the evening in The Slaughtered Lamb. If you can’t make the talks, we’re usually in the pub by 8pm, so you should come and join us.
Registration
To secure a place at the meeting you must register with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it’s polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It’s just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Apr 15, 2012
The April 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Tuesday the 3rd of April, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. Registration details are given below.
Agenda
Demystifying dRuby
Makoto Inoue is going to talk to us about dRuby:
dRuby stands for “Distributed Ruby” and it’s one of less known Ruby
standard libraries. It is one of the first use of Metaprogramming
long before Rails. dRuby creates proxy objects which lets you to
“automagically”(In Matz’s word) delegate method calls to remote objects.
While I was translating The dRuby Book: Distributed and Parallel Computing with Ruby
from Japanese to English, I had a chance to work with Masatoshi Seki,
one of the Ruby core committers and has been using Ruby since
version 1.2. I learnt a lot of interesting Ruby technique from him
and would like to share some of them with you.
Converting a Rails project from MRI to JRuby
Peter Vandenabeele want to talk to us about his experiences converting an Ruby on Rails app from MRI Ruby to JRuby:
Starting from a scaffold Rails app with RSpec and mysql/postgresl
what are the steps to get rspec to pass on JRuby:
- use .rvmrc to switch between MRI and JRuby
- switch out gems (db, server side js, factory_girl 3 vs. 2)
- require_relative => use proper load path
- using 1.9 compatible mode for new style hashes
- waiting for rspec takes longer …
- use JRuby to connect to a Java lib (e.g. HBase jar) :-)
Pub
Whatever we end up doing during the formal part of the meeting, we know it has to end by 8pm. After that we head over to The Slaughtered Lamb fore more fun. Attending the talks isn’t mandatory for attendance of the pub, so if you can’t make the talks you really should come along for the pub.
The nice folks at Yammer are sponsoring some drinks behind the bar, so it’s an even better idea to come along.
Registration
To secure a place at the meeting you must register with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it’s polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It’s just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Mar 26, 2012
The March 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of March, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. Registration details are given below.
Agenda
TDD Fishbowl
Stuart Eccles, fresh from talking about Conan the Deployer at our February Meeting, has offered to organise a Fishbowl session focussing on approaches to TDD.
The idea is not to focus on tedious tool debates like Test::Unit vs. RSpec or Cucumber vs. raw ruby for integration testing; these debates have rang throughout the ages and will continue to do so. We want to explore other debates, such as Obie Fernandez’s suggestion that TDD might not be the best approach for early-stage startups.
The format on the night will be that we’ll have a couple of short opening statements from the panel to seed the discussion and then get going on the discussion. The fishbowl format means that we have 5 chairs at the front, 1 of which is empty. People on the chairs can speak, and if someone from the audience wants to add something to the conversation, they can go up and take the empty chair. As soon as this happens, one of the original panelists must go and sit down.
The initial panel will be:
- Stuart Eccles - Writing tests before validating the business value is pointless
- Tom Stuart - Rails encourages you to to TDD wrong
- Joseph Wilk - The cargo culting of TDD without considering if and why
- Tom Stuart - The “fast specs” paradigm is a red herring for producing better code
Murray Steele will act as moderator, but anyone can get involved by claiming the empty fifth chair.
Pub
It’ll probably be a lively debate, and we’ll want to carry on after 8pm. We do this by heading over to The Slaughtered Lamb where we can continue in more informal settings. If you can’t make the talks you really should come along for the pub.
Registration
To secure a place at the meeting you must register with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it’s polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It’s just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Feb 26, 2012
Meeting Calendar