Meetings
The February 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Tuesday the 21st of February, 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. It’s a great space with plenty of room for the group, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
Lightning talks!
As is now traditional, we devote our February meeting to lightning talks. Not just any old lightning talks either, we use the 20x20 format for the talks. Each speaker has 20 slides that auto-transition after 20 seconds, giving them a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds in which to get their point across.
Our confirmed volunteers for 2012 are:
- James Coglan: A History of Websockets
- Stuart Eccles: Conan the deployer - capistrano extensions focussing on AWS
- Richard Livsey: Something on MonogoDB or something on removing authentication from your models (separation of concerns)
- Harry Marr: Custom documentation generators (example)
- Andrew McDonough: Ruby Poetry
- Chris Parsons: The crowd-sourced talk. One slot at these evenings is given over to someone prepared to do a talk on something that the mailing list suggests, Chris is bravely wearing that mantle this time.
- Roland Swingler: Reading tea leaves - predict the future with ruby!
Also, these brave folk have volunteered, but are waiting in the wings before confirming fully:
This is not the running order, on the night we randomise the order of the speakers for even more fun!
Pub
With all these talks on the night, you’re bound to want to chat to at least one of the speakers afterwards. Have no fear! We do that in The Slaughtered Lamb, which is only five minutes from Skills Matter’s offices. We’ll be there from about 8pm, so if you can’t make the talks come along just for the pub bit.
Registration
Skills Matter ask that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. There’s usually plenty of space for everyone so it’s not a huge problem if you don’t register, we’ll still be allowed in. However, it does help with arranging the room to make sure there are enough seats laid out, and it’s polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but be aware 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 Jan 24, 2012
The January 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of January, 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. It’s a great space with plenty of room for the group, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
Chris McGrath: I18n
Chris McGrath says:
The talk is about lessons learned localising a rails app into nine
different languages. It will cover:
- Why we localised our app
- Why you might want to use rails i18n even if you’re only planning one language
- A little bit about how the i18n gem works for those unfamiliar with it
- Common problems you’ll have and ways to work around them
The app we localised is http://www.kyero.com and the
tool we’ve built to help us and other ruby / rails devs using the i18n gem
in http://localeapp.com.
Joe Corcoran: Judge
Joe Corcoran says:
I’ll talk about building Judge, a client side form validation gem for
Rails 3. I’ll explain how I’ve tried to keep it lightweight and
unassuming, why I ditched jQuery in favour of plain old JavaScript and
what I learned about Rails i18n, form builders and HTML data
attributes along the way. I’ll also give a brief introduction to
Travis, the distributed build system that I’ve been using for
continuous integration.
Pub
The night doesn’t end at 8pm after the talks though. Oh No!. We’re a fun-lovin’ gang so we head over to The Slaughtered Lamb to have a few drinks and continue the ruby chatter well into the night. If you can’t make the talks you really should come along for the pub.
Registration
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. There’s plenty of space so you’ll get in if you forget, but it is polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but be aware this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attending. It’s just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Dec 19, 2011
The December 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of December, 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. It’s a great space with plenty of room for the group, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
If you use, write, or maintain APIs for your web applications, you’ll love our line-up this month; December is API month!
Mark Burns: HATEOAS
Mark Burns says:
I’ve been trying to understand the HATEOAS constraint myself.
Roy Fielding’s blog posts are almost indecipherable to an
ordinary developer like me. I think there’s a huge gap in relevant easily accessible information on
understanding it, and how to implement it, what it’s benefits are etc.
One of the aspects that I’ve found particularly confusing is the concept of not having out-of-band
communication and having discoverable APIs.
In one particular blog post Roy says:
A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of
standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be
understood by any client that might use the API). From that point on, all application state
transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in
the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations.
The transitions may be determined (or limited by) the client’s knowledge of media types and
resource communication mechanisms, both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand).
[Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.]
I’d like to talk about how this limitation on out-of-band information seems both insane and
impractical, maybe impossible. But then I may go on to explore how actually it makes some
form of sense. And how you can use this knowledge to write APIs that are easier to code to,
and whilst not resilient to change in some magical sense, it should allow you to write clients
that are easier to adapt and update.
Javier Ramirez: Usable APIs
Javier Ramirez says:
With the adoption of REST, the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, and the second coming
of JavaScript, exposing our applications as a service is now more important than ever.
Rails or Sinatra make really easy to create a (kinda) RESTful API but, in many occassions,
these APIs are designed without really thinking on the developers that will have to use them.
I want to talk about some of the points that can help making your API more developer-friendly.
Some of the areas I’ll cover will be discoverability, authentication, headers, formats, parameters,
documentation and tools.
Pub
We usually finish the talks at around 8pm and head over to The Slaughtered Lamb to chat about the talks, or whatever comes to mind, over a beer and a fish-finger sandwich. Sometimes you can’t make it to the main event, that’s not a problem though, just come along to the pub and you’ll be welcomed with open arms. Especially if you get there a bit before 8pm and secure me a table.
Registration
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. There’s plenty of space so you’ll get in if you forget, but it is polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but be aware this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attending. It’s just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Nov 27, 2011
The November 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of November, 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. It’s a great space with plenty of room for the group, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
Transformers: Code Blocks In Disguise
Aanand has some Ruby code to show you. It looks a little strange - in fact, it doesn’t even look valid.
Array.run do
x <- ["first", "second"]
y <- ["once", "twice"]
["#{x} cousin #{y} removed"]
end
What does it do, and how does it do it? If you know what a macro is, or a continuation, or a monad, you might be able to guess. If not, don’t worry - by the end, you’ll probably be as confused as everyone else, including the speaker.
My Adventures in Objective-C
Abdel wants to tell us about his experiences of developing an iOS app from a Rubyists perspective:
I have been ducking Objective-C at every turn for a very long time. Who wants to learn a heavily typed static behemoth just to write an iPhone app?!
So, I did what every self respecting programmer would do, throw alternative open solutions aka Javascript frameworks at the problem.
But in the end I had to succumb to the will of the Almighty Apple - I needed their Objective C to make stuff happen … and it wasn’t that bad :)
This is all the learning, similarities (of which there are a few) and differences between Objective-C and Ruby.
Pub
We aim to finish up around about 8pm, but that’s not the end of the evening. After the talks we head on over to The Slaughtered Lamb for some light refreshment and informal chat. If you can’t make the first part of the meeting, please do feel free to turn up to this second part.
Registration
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. There’s plenty of space so you’ll get in if you forget, but it is polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but be aware this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attending. It’s just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Oct 23, 2011
The October 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of October, 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. It’s a great space with plenty of room for the group, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
Battleship: Ruby Fight Club
Paul Battley has written a game engine based on the game of battleships and will be letting us play with it. Before the meeting you should write a player for Paul’s game engine and during the meeting we’ll pit the players against each other in a tournament. Once the winner is declared we’ll look at the player implementations and get their authors to talk about them. In case you win you should be prepared to show off your code and discuss the strategy you implemented.
There is more information available on the mailing list thread where Paul announced the event. If you have any questions the mailing list is the place to ask them.
UPDATE
If you have written a player read this missive from Paul and make sure you are prepared.
Pub
We should be done sinking each other’s battleships by 8pm. Those still on speaking terms will make the short trip to The Slaughtered Lamb, to tell tall tales of maritime success and failure. If you can’t make the battle royale that is the main meeting, feel free to turn up to the pub.
Registration
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. There’s plenty of space so you’ll get in if you forget, but it is polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but be aware this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attending. It’s just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Sep 26, 2011
Meeting Calendar