2010 Meetings

December 2010 Meeting

The winterval meeting will be on Monday the 13th 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

Makoto Inoue - Japanese and Ruby

Makoto Inoue says:

My talk is based on an article called "Japanese and OO" which was written by a Japanese guy who wrote Windows 95 and his thought around what helped him to build the software as a Japanese. I really enjoyed the article and thought it relates to Ruby which is written by another Japanese (the Matz). I will also add some of my own thoughts onto the talk.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Japanese and Ruby

Sean O'Halpin - Processing Tweets at the BBC

Sean was ill so he didn't make this meeting, he did however make it to our January 2011 meeting.

Sean O'Halpin is going to tell us about some work at the BBC involving twitter:

I'll be talking about how we're using Ruby to process tweets in realtime to discover inbound links to the BBC Zeitgeist and how we're reading the Twitter Firehose (about 1000 tweets/sec = about 90 million a day) and storing the data in Amazon S3.

There'll be a bit about Hadoop and Map/Reduce too.

"Analogue Blog"

Our meetings have space, usually at the start, but also between the talks if there's a lot of laptop faffing, for announcements from the audience. If you have something you think is of interest to the group; perhaps a new conferences has announced their CFP or ticket discount, or there's a new gem you want to let people know about, or maybe your team of awesome ninja rockstars is hiring. Whatever! There's no need to ask permission; get up, say your thing and sit down again. Just be quick so you don't run on into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.

Pub

After the talks we'll brave the cold and head to The Slaughtered Lamb for some drinks and more informal chatter. Our talks usually finish at about 8pm, and you'll find us jostling for space at the bar shortly after. If you won't make it for the main meeting, feel free to pop along just for the pub bit.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

Posted by Murray Steele on Dec 01, 2010

November 2010 Meeting

The November meeting will be on Monday the 8th 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

Priit Tamboon - Using git hooks for staging and production

Git has taken the Ruby world by storm, and many of us are using 'git push' on a daily basis. Priit is going to talk about how to use git hooks and will highlight some everyday tips that he has developed and found useful. He's also going to talk about easy ways to replicate Heroku-like deployment for smaller projects using git.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Using git hooks for staging and production

Kalvir Sandhu - More Websockets

Kalv will give an overview of Websockets and how to get a simple app up and running with Cramp. He'll walk through creating a chat based app using Cramp & websockets and will talk briefly on security and authentication with websockets.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : More Websockets

"Analogue Blog"

We start the meetings with short announcements about anything and everything that the group might be interested in. We announce when people are hiring, we announce new conferences that people might want to attend or present at, we announce interesting blog posts to spark debate in the pub afterwards. Anything goes really! You don't have to ask for permission, just get up and say your piece, but keep it quick so you don't run on into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.

Pub

At the end of the evening we'll all head on over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the meeting in more informal surroundings. The main meeting should finish around 8pm, so you'll find us ordering our drinks at the bar shortly after. If you don't think you can make it for the workshop you really should think about coming along for drinks later on, as no doubt there'll be lots of interesting chat in the pub.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

Posted by James Adam on Nov 01, 2010

October 2010 Meeting

The October meeting will be on Monday the 11th 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

Cucumber Workshop

This month we'll be having a Cucumber special.

Joseph Wilk will be sharing his experiences on how you should and shouldn't use Cucumber to test your applications, but rather than a straight forward presentation with him boring everyone with lots of long winded slides he's going to run the evening in a workshop format. Consider it a self help group for Cucumber users where we all get to share things that have and have not worked for us.

There will be some introduction patterns and case studies of good Cucumber practices that he's come across to get things rolling. Coming armed with your own ideas, experiences or complaints will help prevent us all staring at the floor and shuffling our feet.

So if you're using Cucumber and are having problems, if you are not yet sold on it and want some tips, if you think its the source of all evil in the world, head along to this self help group. It would be great if people could share some of the ideas you have brewing in your mind before hand. Just get in touch with Joseph directly or via the LRUG mailing list and help make this a Cuketastic (sorry) workshop!

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Cucumber Workshop

"Analogue Blog"

We start the meetings with short announcements about anything and everything that the group might be interested in. We announce when people are hiring, we announce new conferences that people might want to attend or present at, we announce interesting blog posts to spark debate in the pub afterwards. Anything goes really! You don't have to ask for permission, just get up and say your piece, but keep it quick so you don't run on into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.

Pub

At the end of Joseph's cucumber workshop we'll all head on over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the meeting in more informal surroundings. The main meeting should finish around 8pm, so you'll find us ordering our drinks at the bar shortly after. If you don't think you can make it for the workshop you really should think about coming along for drinks later on, as no doubt there'll be lots of interesting cucumber chat in the pub. And maybe a few interesting cucumber drinks too.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

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 27, 2010

September 2010 Meeting

The September meeting will be on Monday the 13th of September, 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

Rails 3 Internals

Priit Tamboom would like to talk about Rails 3 internals:

Recently I have been porting an app into Rails 3 and probably you have also been poking this new Rails 3 with ruby 1.9.2.

Therefore I would like to discuss a bit more about Rails 3 itself. Particularly, things under railties lib directory covering classes such as Railtie, Engine, Application and will go through initialization with initializers.

Along the way I'll show some examples how you can use this knowledge in your own gem or plugin.

Nothing too fancy but should be useful for developing your next Rails 3 project.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Rails 3 internals

Asynchronous interfaces

Alex MacCaw will talk about moving state to the client side as opposed to the more traditional request/response model. He'll go through the various options, such as Syncro (the successor to Juggernaut), and SuperApp (his JS framework).

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Asynchronous interfaces

"Analogue Blog"

We start the meetings with announcements for the group. If there's something you think the group should know, or something you're looking for help with, this is the time to say it. You don't have to ask for permission, just get up and say your piece. Just keep it short so you don't eat into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.

Pub

When all the talking is over we break ranks and head out for some beer. Our chosen pub The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes from the Skills Matter office. The main meeting finishes around 8pm and you'll find us joslting for service at the bar shortly after. If you don't think you can make it for the talks, you should come along for the beers, as the talks are really just an excuse for going to the pub afterwards.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

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 Aug 25, 2010

August 2010 Meeting

The August meeting will be on Monday the 9th of August, 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

Making old projects better

Tim Cowlishaw and Chris O'Sullivan have been working together on an older project of theirs and want to share some things they've learned about making it a nicer project to work on.

Most of us want better software development processes, and spend a lot of time reading and talking about methods for making better software. However, when you've already been working on a project for a long time, entropy can get the better of you, making it difficult to adapt your working practices. We've been working on a project like this that started 18 months ago, and over the last few months have been steadily improving how we go about things, getting better at BDD and Scrum, and starting to do a bit of Domain Driven Design. We're going to talk about how we got on, focusing in equal parts on refactoring legacy code bases, improving test coverage, and improving processes, as well as revealing the incredible powers of suggestion we employed to convince stakeholders, management and sundry doubters that this was a good idea.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Making old projects better

ittybittyboom.com

Tom Crinson will talk about Cramp and some of the other technologies he's used in his HTML5 Bomberman clone. Tom says:

You'll find out how and why I use cramp to cope with hundreds of simultaneous players on ittybittyboom.com. Cramp is an asynchronous event driven ruby based framework based upon event machine that allows the coder to write succinct, clear code to deal with hundreds or thousands of tcp connections at once.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Ittybittyboom.com and Cramp

"Analogue Blog"

Our meetings start with a short period where we make announcements about things going on in the community. If you have something you think the rest of the group might want to know about; an event, a new gem, a blog post, a company that's hiring or even just to introduce yourself, then this is the time and place to do it. The only rules are that you can't go on about it, we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.

Pub

After the talks we head on over to the more informal surroundings of The Slaughtered Lamb to finish the evening with a beer and maybe a fish-finger sandwich. If you can't make it to for the talks, we'll be heading to the pub at around 8pm, so we can see you there.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

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 Jul 15, 2010

July 2010 Meeting

The July meeting will be on Monday the 12th of July, 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

Carat: An interpreted language, written in Ruby

Jonathan Leighton has recently completed a project for his third year at University, which he thinks we might be interested in:

I ended up writing an interpreter, in Ruby, for a language heavily inspired by Ruby. A sort of distilled Ruby-like language which is far too simplistic to be useful and probably overlooks tonnes of important things.

But anyway! The point is not really that the language is utterly pointless. The point is that it's an interpreter written in a very high-level language, which I think it relatively easy to understand.

So I'm offering to do a talk which would take the listener through the workings of this interpreter. The parsing is done with Treetop, although I wouldn't propose really talking about the parsing at all as I think a lot of people are quite familiar with Treetop.

I might as well finish with some buzzwords. If you ever wondered what "trampoline function" or "continuation passing style" means then this is your chance :)

For those who like spoilers you can see the code on github and read Jonathan's final year report about the project

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Carat: An interpreted language, written in Ruby

ActionEmbedding

Phil Cowans has recently been working on a rails plugin called ActionEmbedding, and he'd like to show it to us:

ActionEmbedding is a simple Rails plugin I've been using to look at ways of building up pages from independent user interface elements called pagelets. The idea is to implement a number of different patterns, including Hierarchical MVC, and make it as easy as possible to switch between them. I'll try to explain why I think this is a good idea, show you what the plugin can do at the moment and talk about how I see it evolving.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : ActionEmbedding

"Analogue Blog"

We start the meeting with a short amount of time where anyone in the room can make an announcement. In the past few months it's mostly been the LRUG job board, but that's not all we want people to talk about. If you've written some fancy new gem and want to tell people about it, this is the time and place to do it. If you read a controversial article about some aspect of ruby that you want to draw people's attention to, this is a great time to mention it. If you've got your finger on the pulse and know about some new hack day or other geek event, this is the room full of people you should mention it to. The rules are simple, you just have to be quick.

Pub

We aim to finish up the formal proceedings of the evening at 8pm. After that we head to a local pub, The Slaughtered Lamb, and have some beers and a chat. If you fancy some lively ruby discussion, but you can't make it for 6:30 you are more than welcome to head straight to the pub. Just look for a group of people wildly debating the syntax of the latest version of RSpec and you'll have found the right group.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

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 Jul 05, 2010

June 2010 Meeting

The June meeting will be on Monday the 14th of June, 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

"My First Ruby"

Murray Steele wants to talk about the first ruby script he ever wrote, and he thinks you might be interested because (in his own words from the mailing list thread where he proposed the talk):

  1. It's a mailing list with a web front-end. The web stuff is pre-rails and I think it's interesting in terms of "look how far we've come". Seriously, if you've never done web development without a higher-level framework like rails you'll be amazed. (For anyone who's heard of it, it uses NARF).

  2. I can pretty much guarantee that my first ruby code is worse than your first ruby code. So for any newbies in the room, it should come as welcome relief that even apparent old-hands like myself have written terrible code (and it truly is terrible code), made terrible design decisions, and done both without the safety net of TDD. Of course, hopefully in the talk I'll point out why, if writing this again, I would use TDD. At the end I hope this talk will make people feel less embarrassed about showing off code of their own at future events; I'll be setting a base-level of awfulness.

  3. This bit of software was written in a weekend and has been in "production" for 7 years 11 months (according to the date I filled in for "when I first started using Ruby" on my Working With Rails profile) and it's been remarkably stable and unchanged for those 7 years. I've no real evidence for this, but it's a scientific fact that it's the longest running piece of ruby software in the world… wouldn't you like to see inside it?

  1. Talks ∋ My first ruby
  2. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : My first ruby

UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel

John Leach kindly offered to do a version of this talk (previously given at Conferencia Rails 2009 and Scottish Ruby Conference 2010). Originally scheduled for our may meeting, he's going to give it this month instead. This is the abstract from his talk at Conferencia Rails:

"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

We in the Ruby Community seem to have a habit of re-inventing things. Sometimes this is for good reason, but in some cases we don't know we're even doing it! We're wasting valuable time that could be spent learning Erlang!

UNIX-like operating systems have been around for decades and lots of problems have come and gone in that time. I'm going to talk about some of the tools available that can be used to solve common Ruby and Rails deployment and development problems.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel

"Analogue Blog"

As per usual there will be some time at the start of the meeting for anyone in the group to get up and let us know about anything you think is relevant to the group. Recently it's just been recruitment announcements, which are great, but it'd be even better if people mentioned some other news items; maybe you've just released a top-notch gem, or read a thought-provoking article you want to let people know about, or there's some event you've spotted that you think rubyists would be interested in. It's really up to you what you say, just keep it short because we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.

Pub

The meeting usually finishes at around 8pm, but that's not the end of the evening. We can be found at around 8:05pm jostling for service at The Slaughtered Lamb. If you're not going to make it to the main meeting, you really should come along to the pub for a quick drink and a bit of a blather.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

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 May 25, 2010

May 2010 Meeting

The May meeting will be on Wednesday the 12th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm7:00pm to 8:30pm. 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

(j)ruby profilers

Dan Lucraft is going to talk to us about ruby profilers, specifically his jruby-prof gem. Even though his gem is for jruby only, he's going to give us a good grounding on "pure" ruby profilers first.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Ruby Profilers

Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant and Kyoto Cabinet: the world of Mikio ware

Makoto Inoue gave a short talk at the recent nosqleu conference about Tokyo Cabinet and he offered to give a slightly retooled (and more ruby focussed) version of that talk for us. The blurb for his original talk is as follows:

Tokyo Cabinet is one of the first "Key Value" stores. It was released in 2007, but surprisingly small number of people knows what it is really capable of. Makoto, the maintainer of Tokyo Cabinet Wiki will unveil the core philosophy and exciting features behind these products.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant and Kyoto Cabinet: the World of Mikio Ware

UNIX: Rediscovering the wheel

John Leach kindly offered to do a version of this talk (previously given at Conferencia Rails 2009 and Scottish Ruby Conference 2010), but unfortunately he had to pull out at the last minute due to a double booking. We'll try to reschedule this talk for a future meeting.

"Analogue Blog"

There'll always be time at the start of the meeting (and between the speakers) for anyone in the group to get up and say something. Use this time to let us know about anything you think is relevant to the group: maybe announce that your awesome team is hiring, or that you've just released a really interesting gem, or draw people's attention to a controversial blog post, or event to ask for some help working on a personal project. It's really up to you what you say, just keep it short because we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.

Pub

We aim to finish at about 8:30pm, after which we make the short walk from Skills Matter's offices to our watering hole of choice: The Slaughtered Lamb. Even if you can't make the formal part of the evening, you know where we are if you want to pop along for some of the more informal chat. You'll be more than welcome.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are planning to come to the meeting. If you forget to register it's unlikely that you'd be turned away at the door, but it has happened before when we've been really busy. Even without the worry of being turned away hanging over your head, it's useful for fire regulations and to help our hosts arrange the room properly. And most importantly it's simple manners (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

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 Apr 28, 2010

April 2010 Meeting

The April meeting will be on Wednesday the 14th 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. 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

What every computer programmer should know about time

Sean O'Halpin says:

I've been putting some notes together on time similar in spirit (if not in detail) to "What every computer programmer should know about floating-point arithmetic" ranging from localtime vs UTC, hardware clocks and NTP, how to do accurate timers in Javascript, calendars, date arithmetic, comparisons and gotchas, to Lamport/vector clocks (the new black in the 'eventually consistent' world of nosql).

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

MongoDB

Seth Edwards, one of the committers to the C# driver for MongoDB (and who plays with the ruby driver in his spare time) is in town and in has volunteered to give us a talk on MongoDB. He'll cover the use-cases for why we might want to use MongoDB in our apps and also give examples of using the ruby driver.

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

"Analogue Blog"

As usual we'll have 10-15 minutes at the start of the meeting for anyone to fill up with something they think might be of interest to the group. It's really up to you what you say: announce a gem you've written, ask for help on a project, say you are interested in talking to someone in the pub after wards who knows about a particular gem, or even just say hi. the only rule is to keep it short as there'll be others who want to say something and we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.

Pub

When the talks are finished, we make the short walk over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the evening in a more informal setting. The talks tend to finish around about 8pm so if you find that you can't make it to the meeting but still fancy some Ruby chat, head along for just the pub bit. Maybe you can score us a table?

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are planning to come to the meeting. You won't be turned away at the door if you haven't registered (unless we're really full), but it's useful for fire regulations and to help them arrange the room properly. Finally, it's simply just polite, and well, MINASWAN, so please do register.

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 Mar 19, 2010

March 2010 Meeting

The March meeting will be on Wednesday the 10th of March, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a great new space and we there won't be the problems we've had in the past with fitting people in, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.

Agenda

Software Craftsmanship

This month Chris Parsons and Corey Haines will be leading us in an evening of exploration of the ideas behind Software Craftsmanship.

Where the agile movement focused on principles for developing better software, the software craftsmanship movement focuses on developing better software developers, growing out of a frustration with the current state of the software development industries. Starting with Uncle Bob's keynote about 'craft over crap', many companies and individuals started looking at concrete ways to advance our field into a true profession; the focus generally resting on two key areas: ways to effectively acquire new practices and ways to bring new people into our field.Chris and Corey will be presenting their thoughts on how this affects businesses and personal careers.

With the emphasis on developer improvement, might we lose the focus on delivering business value? Chris will talk about how craftsmanship ideas have been applied at Eden, showing there doesn't have to be a conflict between these two goals.

The terms 'apprentice' and 'journeyman' are often thrown around without really defining what they mean in terms of acquiring skills and techniques. Corey will discuss these words, describing concrete definitions that go past the FUD often associated with them (nobody is asking you to doff your cap or mop the floors with a toothbrush).

We will then hold a Q&A session and answer people's questions and comments. If there's time, Corey will discuss and perform a code kata, one helpful way to practice our techniques.

Videos of Chris's talk (slides) and Corey's talk (slides) are available on the Skills Matter site.

"Analogue Blog"

After the hiatus in February, the analogue blog will return at the start of this meeting. There'll be about 10-15 minutes available for anyone to get up and say something to the group. It's a open forum for the local community to speak to each other, maybe to announce a newly released gem or library, maybe to ask the rest of the group for some help, or to suggest a theme for a future meeting. The only rule is that you shouldn't go on for too long as there are other people that want to say something too.

Pub

After the meeting we head on over to The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes walk from the Skills Matter eXchange. If you can't make it to the meeting, we usually finish up at about 8pm if you want to head along for just the pub bit.

Registration

Skills Matter still prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are planning to come. It's not a disaster if you don't, as there's plenty of space, but it is polite to let them know you are coming so they can set the room up appropriately. You'll also get a name badge, so you really should register.

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 Feb 19, 2010

February 2010 Meeting

The February meeting will be on Wednesday the 10th of February, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a great new space and we there won't be the problems we've had in the past with fitting people in, but you should still register early to let Skills Matter know you are coming.

Agenda

Lightning talks!

This month we're having our annual lightning talk evening. If you've not been to one of these before it's quite simple; we have lots of short talks all on one night. We use the 20x20 format for our talks which means that each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-transition after 20 seconds, this gives them 6 minutes 40 seconds to get their point across. It's a really fun way to run a lightning talk event, and the rigid time constraints mean that the talks tend to be really entertaining (jettisoning for brevity things like explanations or support for the speakers opinions).

The current line-up of 20x20-ers is as follows:

Rails & iPhone integration

Paul Ardeleanu:

Paul will talk to us about Rails & iPhone integration.

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Rails & iPhone Integration

Using Websockets with EventMachine

Ismael Celis:

Using Websockets with EventMachine.

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Using Websockets with EventMachine

Show Off!

Joel Chippindale:

Joel will talk about Show Off; ruby-based HTML presentation software (this talk might get a bit meta).

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Show Off, a Ruby-Based HTML Presentation Software

Evolution of data models in rails

Lars Jorgensen

Evolution of data models in Rails. Lessons learned.

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Evolution of Data Models in Rails - Lessons Learned

Bowline - a ruby GUI framework

Alex MacCaw:

Bowline - Alex has been building a ruby GUI framework and wants to show it off.

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Bowline: A Ruby GUI Framework

An intro to birdpie.com

Anup Narkhede

birdpie.com - Anup will introduce the site and the architecture behind it; Rails 3.0, Redis, and Resque.

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Architecture of Birdpie, a Twitter Application

Rack::Cache

Thomas Pomfret:

All about Rack::Cache and associated things.

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Rack::Cache and associated things

Decorating the domain

Brent Snook:

Decorating the domain - Wrapping polymorphic presentation logic around the model.

  1. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Decorating the Domain - Wrapping Polymorphic Presentation Logic Around the Model

Some rough fibrous material

Murray Steele

The mailing list suggested that Murray talk about Fibers in Ruby 1.9.

  1. Talks ∋ Some rough fibrous material
  2. Skills Matter : Skills Cast : Fibers in Ruby 1.9

"Analogue Blog"

Depending on how many lighning talks there are, we may have time at the start of the meeting for 10-15 minutes of free time for anyone to speak. You don't need to ask for permission or let us know in advance that you have something to say here, just turn up, stand up and say it! It's a forum for announcements, or pleas for help, or a soapbox for starting discussions. Just remember not to run on for too long as there's probably other people that want to say something too (it would also be embarrassing if you ran on for longer than our scheduled lightning talks!).

Pub

The meeting will finish around 8pm and we'll be in a local pub shortly thereafter. The pub we tried after the last meeting was The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes walk from Skills Matter's new office. If you can't make it for the main meeting consider, coming along as an advance guard to the pub and securing us some tables.

Registration

Registration isn't mandatory as Skills Matter's new office has plenty of space. That said, you really should register as it lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly and means you'll get a name badge so people know who you are. If there aren't enough seats, people without name badges will have to sit on the floor. Please do register.

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 Jan 21, 2010

January 2010 Meeting

The first meeting of LRUG in 2010 will be on Wednesday the 13th of January, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a bright new space and we shouldn't have any problems with fitting people in, but you should still register your attendance early to let Skills Matter know you are coming.

Agenda

Symbol vs. String

Julian couldn't make it because of inclement weather.

Julian Burgess fresh from his special guest hosting of the December meeting is going to step once more into the spotlight, but this time he's going to give us a talk:

When I first started down the road of learning Ruby I had no idea what a symbol was. Gradually I've learnt to the point that I believe I can identify cases where using a symbol will be a good idea (saving memory and speed) and cases where it would be a bad idea (eating up all your memory).

The talk would be pretty short, I might say something which is completely wrong so will rely on the crowd to correct me. The goal being at the end for everyone in the room to understand and love the symbol.

Note: Description borrowed from his Ruby Manor proposal. You can check the thread to see what other things people asked for that he might cover.</strike>

Dragonfly

Mark Evans gave us an overview of a new file attachment gem he'd written called Dragonfly. The interesting thing about this gem is that rather than specifying the thumbnail sizes at the model level, you specify them at the point at which you want to use them in the view and leave it up to caching to deal with performance.

Thanks to Mark for stepping in at the last minute!

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

An update on Redcar

Daniel Lucraft is going to talk to us about Redcar, the Ruby IDE he's been writing. Daniel first talked to us about it in March last year and he wants to give us an update on how it's been going since then. He recently released 0.3 and is looking for interested rubyists to play start hacking on it.

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

"Analogue Blog"

We'll start the meeting with 10-15 minutes of free time for anyone to speak. You don't need to ask for permission or let us know in advance that you have something to say here, just turn up, stand up and say it! It's a forum for announcements, or pleas for help, or a soapbox for starting discussions. Just remember not to run on for too long as there's probably other people that want to say something too.

Pub

We aim to finish up the meeting by 8pm, after which we mosey on down to … well … we're not sure. Skills Matter's new office isn't close to our old preferred pub, so we're going to have to find a new one. We've organised a special LRUG Nights to do just that. Watch this space to find out what pub we choose (or come along on the 6th to help us choose!). Regardless of what pub we choose, if for any reason you can't make the talks it's fine to come along just for the pub part of the meeting.

Registration

Registration isn't mandatory as Skills Matter's new office has plenty of space. However, registration lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly and if you don't register you might have to sit on the floor. It's also polite to let people know if you're coming. So, please do register.

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 Dec 17, 2009