2015 Meetings

December 2015 Meeting

The December 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of December, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm).

Venue reminder

Skills Matter are our hosts and have recently moved to Code Node a great new venue between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Festive CodeWarsJam

Sam Joseph is going to lead us through a practical exercise he calls "CodeWarsJam". He describes it as follows:

A CodeWarsJam is a session where small teams of coders work on the same coding problem together. The problems are usually relatively simple and can be reviewed as a group every 20 minutes or so. Recently at MakersAcademy we've had great fun with CodeWarsJams, where we take coding kata from http://codewars.com and use them to run a CodeWarsJam. CodeWarsJam is great because when you solve a problem you get to see all the other variant solutions that others have coded, sorted by popularity. Come join the festive coding fun as LRUG's first CodeWarsJam!

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : LRUG - Festive CodeWarsJam

Ticket Giveaway

Beyond

The organisers of Beyond, a conference aimed at junior developers in London on 23rd November, have provided a pair of free tickets for 1 lucky LRUG member and a discount code for £90 off the ticket price for everyone else. The tickets were be raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Friday 13th November. Thanks Beyond organisers!

Pub

We'll be CodeWarsJam-ing until 8pm after which we'll close our laptops and seek out some food and drink. Our preferred local haunt is:

Singer Tavern
1 City Road
EC1Y 1AG

See on a map

Even if you can't make the main meeting, there'll be loads to talk about so please do turn up just for this bit.

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?

Posted by Murray Steele on Nov 15, 2015

November 2015 Meeting

The November 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of November, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm).

Venue reminder

Skills Matter continue to host us, but do remember that they've moved. We're at Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Hack like a journalist

Scott Matthewman says:

News reporters are trained in techniques to produce stories that are concise, well structured, easy to follow and with a consistent house style. How can those same techniques help us write better code?

  1. Slides for Hack like a journalist
  2. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Hack like a journalist

Leveraging immutability in Ruby

Lorenzo Barasti says:

Why should we care about using immutable objects in our code? What does functional programming have to do with immutability? How do we approach immutability when the frameworks and libraries we use seem to go a different direction?

We'll try to answer these questions by looking at the ideas behind the implementation of some immutable data structure.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Leveraging immutability in Ruby

No-Man’s Land - Finding peace at the border of art and tech

Kevin Monk and Simon Sharville :

However good the underlying tech, ugly applications discourage users, pretty ones will attract them. A gulf exists between the artists and the technicians who need to bring those designs to life. Co-presented by a graphic designer and a developer, we’ll discuss our approach to keeping both artists and technicians within their comfort zone to create applications that work well AND look good.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : No-Man’s Land - Finding peace at the border of art and tech

Pub

When the talks end we head over to a local pub to grab some food, a drink, and discuss the talks we've just seen and other goings-on in the Ruby community. The pub is:

Singer Tavern
1 City Road
EC1Y 1AG

See on a map

We should be there just after 8pm. If you're unable to attend the talks, do feel free to come along just for the pub.

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?

Posted by Murray Steele on Oct 20, 2015

October 2015 Meeting

The October 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of October, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm).

Venue reminder

Skills Matter continue to host us, but do remember that they've moved. We're in Code Node venue between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Debugging and fixing performance issues with the mustache gem and partials

Alice Bartlett and Dom Baggott say:

A quick blast through encountering a feature with performance in the mustache gem. How we debugged it and how we fixed it. This talk will be a bit less boring than it sounds.

  1. Fixing a performance issue with the mustache gem
  2. Technology at GDS : Major performance issue with Mustache and partials
  3. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Debugging and fixing performance issues with the mustache gem and partials

API-first banking

Jonas Huckestein says:

What would you build on top of your bank if it had a REST API & Webhooks? At Mondo, we're looking forward to finding out. Our API (plus Ruby client library) is in beta (docs here), and we hosted our first hackathon a couple of weeks ago. Come along to find out what people built!

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : API-first banking

ActiveRecord vs N+1

Stanisław Klajn says:

In this talk would like to focus on dealing with N+1: how to detect it, how to get rid of it and, most importantly, how to avoid it.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : ActiveRecord vs N+1

Book Giveaway

Future Learn

Our friends at Future Learn have arranged to give away a book to 16 lucky LRUG members. The 16 winners of the giveaway are able to choose a copy of Practical Object Oriented Design with Ruby or 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. If you'd like to enter use this form. The deadline for entry is 1pm on Monday, 12th October 2015.

Pub

Of the local pubs we've tried so far Singer Tavern seems the most accomodating so we'll try it again:

Singer Tavern
1 City Road
EC1Y 1AG

See on a map

We aim to finish the talks no later than 8pm, which gives us an ETA of about 8:10 at the pub. If you can't make the talks please do join us afterwards for food, drinks and ruby chat.

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?

Posted by Murray Steele on Sep 21, 2015

September 2015 Meeting

The September 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of September, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm).

Venue change!

We're back with our usual hosts, Skills Matter, but it's in their new Code Node venue between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

A pull request slackbot : the seal

Tatiana Soukiassian says:

As part of my 20% project at GDS, I developed a Slackbot that reminds developers of their team's pull requests that are awaiting review. I will talk about why and how the seal was built, and what I learned from building it.

  1. Reminding developers about code reviews
  2. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : A pull request slackbot : the seal

Containers Patterns for Rails

Jairo Diaz says:

In this talk we explore how to use docker containers to run ruby on rails applications. Rails applications usually require several different components such as Nginx, Redis, MySQL, Mongo and background jobs. We will show how to set up and manage the configuration of these elements.

  1. Containers Patterns for Rails
  2. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Containers Patterns for Rails

Learning through blameless reviews

Joel Chippindale says:

In this talk I will outline some of the ways that teams react to the mistakes they make and how blameless reviews can help teams learn from these mistakes

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Learning through blameless reviews

Ticket Giveaway #1

All Your Base

The organisers of All Your Base, a data and databases conference in London on 13th November, have provided free tickets for 5 lucky LRUG memebers and a 15% discount code for everyone else. The tickets will be raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Friday 4th September. Thanks All Your Base organisers!

Ticket Giveaway #2

Braintree Payments

The nice folk at Braintree Payments got in touch to provide us with two 1-day passes for FOWA London 2015, a web and frontend conference in London on 5-7th October. They also provided a 20% discount code for those too unlucky to win one of the passes. The tickets will be raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Monday 14th September. Thanks Braintree Payments!

Pub

After the talks we continue the meeting at a nearby pub. We're still trying out the local pubs to see which one will suit us the best. This time we're going to try out Singer Tavern:

Singer Tavern
1 City Road
EC1Y 1AG

See on a map

Our talks should end at about 8pm, so if you are unable to attend those you can still join us afterwards in the pub.

Braintree Payments

Not content with providing the tickets for FOWA, the extremely nice folk at Braintree Payments have also arranged to put some money behind the bar after the meeting. Thanks again Braintree Payments!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

Venue

The venue for this meeting is:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?

Posted by Murray Steele on Aug 21, 2015

August 2015 Meeting

The August 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of August, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm).

Venue change!

We're back with our usual hosts, Skills Matter, but it's in their new Code Node venue between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Hello, declarative world

Tom Stuart says:

Ruby’s billed as a “multi-paradigm” language, but, let’s face it, we use it to write imperative object-oriented programs. I'm interested in different ways of programming computers, because I reckon imperative programs are far too low-level and overspecified, which is why as a species we're generally terrible at writing them. In this talk I want to encourage you to think outside of your normal programming habits; I’ll present a more abstract and declarative style called relational programming, and show you how to implement a minimal relational language in Ruby. (Dog whistle: this is μkanren.)

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Hello, declarative world

Domain Driven Design, In the Wild

Chris Patuzzo says:

Every day, we write software that solves business problems. How we actually do that is largely up to us. We tend to build models that encapsulate complexity and provide abstractions that help us reason about the problems we solve.

We stress our models with incremental development. Changing business requirements challenge the durability of our models. The magnitude of change is an indicator for the effectiveness of our models' ability to represent the problem domain.

At Which? we used Domain Driven Design to deliver our most recent project. In this talk, I will share those insights. I aim to cut through the jargon and give concrete, real-world examples of how we applied the principles of DDD to build a product that anticipates change.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Domain Driven Design, In the Wild

Ticket Giveaway

container.camp

The organisers of container.camp, a conference about software virtualization to be held in London on 11th September, were kind enough to get in touch and provide a free ticket to their conference and a discount code for everyone. The ticket was raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Friday 7th August. Thanks container.camp organisers!

Pub

The talks will end at 8pm and we'll head to a local pub. As it's a new venue we don't know which one will best accomodate us so we're going to try out Finch's Pub:

Finch’s Pub
12a Finsbury Square
Moorgate
EC2A 1AN

See on a map

If you can't make the talks then we'll be there from about 8pm; feel free to join us.

thoughtbot

The nice folk at thoughtbot, have agreed to put some money behind the bar. Chad Pytel will be in attendance so do seek him out to thank him for buying your drink (and to find out what thoughtbot are up to in London). Thanks thoughtbot for supporting us!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

Venue

The venue for this meeting is:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?

Posted by Murray Steele on Jul 25, 2015

July 2015 Meeting

The July 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of July, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm).

Host & venue change!

Our usual hosts are unavailable for this meeting. Thankfully Overleaf and Altmetric stepped forward to host us in a venue in their office complex.

This venue has strict 100 person capacity and we require attendees to register in advance (for free). Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

LEARNING HOW TO LEARN RUBY (and rails, and sinatra, and …)

Sam Joseph says:

At Makers Academy we coach students through the process of learning Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, JavaScript, JQuery and Angular over the course of 12 weeks. Students range in age from 18 to 60, although the majority are in their late 20s or early 30s, already have university degrees (often a humanities subject) and have spent 5+ years in the workplace doing sales, marketing, design, management or some other relatively non-technical role. The majority of students have also had almost no programming experience prior to their preparation for the interview and selection process that they must go through to get on the course. In this talk I will explore what makes a 12 week intensive bootcamp tick, and the particular challenges the students face with learning Ruby and JavaScript.

Flaky tests & Capybara best practices

Karlotcha Hoa says:

One of the main purposes of testing is to enable us to trust the performance of our code in an automated way. Unfortunately, several problems often arise with automated tests. One common and particularly annoying problem that we began experiencing in our codebase was flakiness.

In this talk, I will discuss common problems that may cause this issue, and some solutions we discovered based on our own experience at SimplyBusiness.

Pub

The talks will end at 8pm and we'll head to The Fellow shortly after. We've reserved the entire first floor, so if you can't make the talks but want to hang out with some rubyists afterwards, head on over and climb the stairs to say "hi".

thoughtbot

Chad Pytel from thoughtbot was kind enough to put some money behind the bar at The Fellow. Thanks to him and thoughtbot for supporting us!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

Venue

The venue for this meeting is:

The Stables
Trematon Walk
London
N1 9FN

See on a map

And has been provided for us by:

Overleaf

And:

Altmetric

Thanks to both companies!

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register via our Eventbrite page or via the embedded ticket widget below. The venue has a capacity of 100 people and we'll have to be strict about registrations. Eventbrite lets you fully manage your ticket, so if you realise you can't go please return the ticket and let someone else attend in your place.

You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?

Posted by Murray Steele on Jun 21, 2015

June 2015 Meeting

The June 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th 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. Registration details are given below.

Agenda

Redis is the answer, what's the question?

Garry Shutler says:

There are very few things that are part of my go-to toolbox, but Redis is one of those things. I don't think there's a better, more flexible piece of infrastructure you can have at your disposal.

I'll cover the very basics of using Redis and general patterns that you can use within your own systems. I'll also share some concrete examples of what we've used it for at Cronofy.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Redis is the answer, what's the question?

Ruby Magic

As a child, Andrew McDonough loved magic. One of the best Christmas presents he ever received was a magic set. As an adult, Andrew prefers to perform magic using Ruby. In this talk, he will attempt an array of traditional magic tricks, using only IRB.

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

Test Bisection with RSpec

Simon Coffey says:

I'll talk about a useful technique for debugging order-dependent test failures, and introduce an upcoming feature in RSpec that automates it.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Test Bisection with RSpec

Pub

All those talks will take us to about 8pm, after which we leave Skills Matter's offices and head over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the meeting. While we ask you to register for the talks, there's no need to do so for this pub part; feel free to turn up even if you don't make it for the talks.

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. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

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 May 29, 2015

May 2015 Meeting

The May 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th 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

Rewriting Code and Culture

Sabrina Leandro says:

This is the story of a company that survived a much needed transformation of its product and codebase, but most importantly, of its culture. There's no real prescription for being agile. It's about the journey a team takes to discover how to best work together and deliver great products.

In this presentation, I'll share a candid view of a team trying to overcome a slow product development process. How we refactored our way out of badly coupled code, moved to continuous deployment, and greatly improved our approach to product and software development.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Rewriting Code and Culture

Rails New Way

Kamil Lelonek is going to talk about building modern, maintainable and robust Rails applications. He asks:

  • Why a conventional Rails architecture fails?
  • What price do we pay for Rails’ simplicity?
  • Why Rails tries to solve complex problems in one monolithic class?
  • Should we follow the Rails way or drop Rails at all?

With presented building blocks he'll try to help solve common problems in current Rails applications.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Rails New Way

Book Giveaway

Infinitium Global

The nice people at Infinitium Global have arranged to make 20 copies of David A. Black's "The Well Grounded Rubyist 2nd Edition" available to LRUG members and we'll be handing them out at this meeting. We used our mailing list to allocate each book to a lucky LRUG member on a first-come, first-served basis. Infinitium are hoping to make this a regular event, so if you'd like to be in with a chance of getting your hands on a book in the future you should sign up to our mailing list.

Pub

Our talks usually end at about 8pm after which many members can be found at The Slaughtered Lamb chatting about what they just learned and other goings-on in the ruby world. The pub is large and has a good menu of food and drinks (alcoholic and non) so all are welcome, even if you were unable to attend the talks.

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. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

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 May 01, 2015

April 2015 Meeting

The April 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th 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

Un-artificial Intelligence: How People Learn

Melinda Seckington says:

Most developers are familiar with the basics of AI: how do you make a computer, an algorithm, a system learn something? What most don't realize though is that the same principles are applied to people. This talk looks at the theory behind how people learn, and maps it to real life examples of how specifically developers learn.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Un-artificial Intelligence: How People Learn

The shiny new mongo gem

Emily Stolfo is visiting from Berlin to tell us all about writing the new ruby driver for MongoDB:

The Ruby team at MongoDB spent the last year building a new driver – the mongo gem – that was released a few weeks ago. Emily is going to talk about how they built the driver, its design, and why its availability is so exciting for the Rails and Ruby community.

For reference, an article announcing the release: shar.es/1g0PFK

MongoDB 3.0 was also released a few weeks ago and she'll talk a bit about what makes this version so monumental and why you should try it out.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : The new MongoDB Ruby driver 2.0

Pub

The formal talks-and-speakers-based part of the meeting ends around 8pm, after which we make the short trip to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the event. Most of the attendees and speakers are usually here so it's a great chance to find out what's going on in the LRUG community, or to catch up with or make some new friends. Attendance of the talks is not a prerequisite for coming to the pub, so please do 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. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

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 23, 2015

March 2015 Meeting

The March 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th 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

Exploring #to_proc

Paul Mucur says:

A look at how some "odd syntax" introduced in Rails 1.1 and then added to Ruby itself might not solely be for the sake of convenience but hint at a more powerful idea seen in other programming languages.

  1. Exploring #to_proc
  2. Exploring #to_proc SkillsCast
  3. Data Structures as Functions (or, Implementing Set#to_proc and Hash#to_proc in Ruby)

pkgr - Packaging Ruby applications with no sweat

Łukasz Korecki says:

In the life of every* project there is this moment where standard deployment methods just don’t cut it. You have many servers, many applications, many developers. It can become a mess very, very quickly.

Have you ever dreamed of hosting your own apt repository? When was the last time you were annoyed about slow deployment times because the asset pipeline needs to run every single server your app runs on? Oh and lets not mention installing ruby version managers on servers, ok? (I will though).

In this talk I will show how packaging (and deploying) Ruby applications doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming and can work with a project of any size.

* - huge assumption warning!”

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : pkgr - Packaging Ruby applications with no sweat

Pizza

Braintree Payments

The nice people at Braintree Payments have arranged to buy some pizza for us to eat during the talks. The Pizza will be there from about 6pm so turn up early if you're hungry! There'll be a selection to suit most tastes: meat-eaters, vegetarian, and vegan. We're not sure if the pizza company does a gluten-free option, but we'll get one if they do.

Thanks Braintree!

Pub

The talks end at 8pm and I'm sure all that talking and pizza will have given us a bit of a thirst. The evening continues at The Slaughtered Lamb which is a 5 minute walk from the Skills Matter office. It's a great opportunity to talk to the speakers in question, or just catch up with some other London rubyists. If you're unable to attend the talks please feel free to attend the pub only.

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. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

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 25, 2015

February 2015 Meeting

The February 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th 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. Registration details are given below.

Agenda

Lightning Talks!

As usual we give our February meeting over to lightning talks of no more than 10 minutes in length.

Paul Battley

A library for handling postcodes

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : A library for handling postcodes

Andrew Donovan

Finding and taking opportunities in the enterprise

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Finding and taking opportunities in the enterprise

Paula Kennedy

Microaggression: Impact on Women in IT

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Microaggression Impact on Women in IT

Mark Longair

Introducing YourNextMP

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Introducing YourNextMP

Evgeny Shadchnev

How to help beginners learn to code

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : How to help beginners learn to code

Alex Sunderland

The weird bits of ruby

Pip Taylor

Sorting out Colour

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Sorting out Colour

Michael Wawra

Tech evangelism

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Tech Evangelism

Bath Ruby Conf tickets giveaway

Team Prime

Bath Ruby Conference 2015

Thanks to the nice folks at Team Prime and Bath Ruby we are able to provide 4 people with free tickets and a £70 allowance (enough to cover return train travel from London). The tickets are available to LRUG members that wouldn't otherwise be able to attend. The deadline to put your name forward for a ticket is midnight on Sunday 8th, February 2014. If more than 4 people request the tickets a draw will be held privately to select the winners. The recipients of the tickets will not be publicly announced, but we'll thank Team Prime and the Bath Ruby Conf organisers at the start of the meeting.

Pub

All those talks are bound to generate some thoughts we'd like to discuss afterwards. So we cross Goswell Road and head down to The Slaughtered Lamb to have those discussions in a more informal setting. If you didn't make it for the talks then do feel free to turn up just for this bit.

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. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

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 Jan 29, 2015

January 2015 Meeting

The January 2015 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th 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. Registration details are given below.

Agenda

Who’s afraid of database views?

Robbie Clutton isn't, that's for sure:

Many Rails codebases I look at work hard to put all logic into the application source code, using the database only a dumb store. But, there are circumstances where it makes sense to leverage features of a database and in this talk I'll cover one of those features in Views. I'll walk through examples of why you might want logic in two places, how views compare to caching for performance considerations, using views as a facade on legacy tables and how to test views alongside your application.

  1. Who's afraid of database views?
  2. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Who’s afraid of database views?

PeerConnect all the things

Tom Cartwright says:

WebRTC is an exciting technology currently in, or coming soon to a browser near you. In this talk I will explain what it is, how it works and how to setup some ruby services to support a WebRTC-based application.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : PeerConnect all the things

Telling stories through your commits

Joel Chippindale has a story to tell:

In this talk we'll look at some of the ways that you can improve how you develop code and communicate with your team through your commits.

  1. Telling stories through your commits
  2. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Telling stories through your commits

Pub

After the speakers are done it's time for the rest of us to give our vocal chords a workout. We have to leave Skills Matter by 8pm so we head to The Slaughtered Lamb to do so. If you can't make the talks then do feel free to attend this part. There's no need to register for this bit though, so just turn up!

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. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.

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 Jan 06, 2015