October 2009 Meeting

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 14th of October, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, at our new venue The Crypt (it's very close to our previous venues). We still need people to register though to make sure the room is set up properly.

Agenda

Brent Snook: A trio of gems

Brent offered to talk about one or more of the following three gems he's been working on:

  • baldrick - used for gluing stuff together; can be used to monitor RSS among other things
  • numerouno - English natural language parser for numbers ('seventy seven'.as_number == 77)
  • bumps - used to pull in Cucumber features from another source and also push the results of a run

There was most interest in bumps but if you get on our mailing list you can let him know which you'd rather hear more about.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : A trio of gems

Tom Stuart : Enumerators

During our last meeting, Tom was surprised by how many people (both Ruby newbies and "Rails not Ruby" programmers) were asking questions about Enumerable, e.g. what map/inject/zip etc do. Tom has massive functional chops and is going to give a talk that starts with this and then expands into a rant about programming in a functional style.

A video of Tom's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

  1. Thinking Functionally in Ruby
  2. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Thinking Functionally in Ruby

Others

We still have room for one more speakers, or we can let Tom and Brent talk for longer. Let us know if you're interested.

"Analogue Blog"

We missed out on this during the Dojo meeting last month because of time constraints. We'll make sure there's time this month though. The idea is that we have 10-15 minutes at the start of the meeting for anyone to say whatever they think is interesting; you could announce a gem you've written, you could point out a nice plugin or tool that you've been using recently, you can mention a blog post that got you thinking, you could ask for some help on a pet-project, basically anything goes, just keep it short so that everyone else has time to speak!

Pub

At the end of the meeting we like to head over to The Crown Tavern for a spot of socialising over a beer or two. We're usually at the pub from about 8:00pm ish so if you don't think you can make the "proper" meeting feel free to come along just for the pub. It's fine to turn up to the meeting late though, you don't have to be there at 6:30 to get in!

Registration

Our new venue doesn't have any capacity problems, so registration isn't mandatory. That said, it's really helpful if you do register with Skills Matter if you are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter layout the room properly and make sure everyone has a name badge to help with socialising later.

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

Posted by Murray Steele on Sep 18, 2009