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