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May 2012 Meeting

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The May 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th 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

Ruby’s bin men: a closer look at the garbage collector

Elise Huard is going to give us a version of the talk she has proposed for EuRuKo 2012:

The Garbage Collector: how does it work? What does it mean when people speak about stop-the-world, mark-and-sweep, generational garbage collectors? How does ruby fare at collecting its own garbage? What does it mean when they say 1.9.3’s garbage collector has improved? This talk will explain those concepts, what the impact of garbage collection is on our programs, and what future could be.

This description is taken from her pull request on EuRuKo’s github-based cfp. If you like her talk, or have any comments, feel free to get involved over there to let the EuRuKo organisers know that they should select it.

Dependency Injection, the Dependency Inversion Principle, and You

Tom Stuart is also going to give us a version of his EuRuKo proposal:

It’s received wisdom that Ruby doesn’t need dependency injection frameworks. In this talk, I’ll claim that this is at least in part because we don’t apply the Dependency Inversion Principle properly. I’ll explore the intent of the principle, its benefits for maintainable and testable code, and show how to improve existing code through its application.

I’ll then go on to explore how to create objects with dependencies wired in, hoping to settle the question of whether we need a framework to do this.

Tom’s talk is also available for discussion on the EuRuKo gothub-based CFP. Comments, notes, etc.. should go there if you have them.

Pub

After the talks we continue the evening in The Slaughtered Lamb. If you can’t make the talks, we’re usually in the pub by 8pm, so you should come and join us.

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 Skills Matter you wish to attend. It’s just for the lols, innit?

April 2012 Meeting

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The April 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Tuesday the 3rd 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

Demystifying dRuby

Makoto Inoue is going to talk to us about dRuby:

dRuby stands for “Distributed Ruby” and it’s one of less known Ruby standard libraries. It is one of the first use of Metaprogramming long before Rails. dRuby creates proxy objects which lets you to “automagically”(In Matz’s word) delegate method calls to remote objects. While I was translating The dRuby Book: Distributed and Parallel Computing with Ruby from Japanese to English, I had a chance to work with Masatoshi Seki, one of the Ruby core committers and has been using Ruby since version 1.2. I learnt a lot of interesting Ruby technique from him and would like to share some of them with you.

Converting a Rails project from MRI to JRuby

Peter Vandenabeele want to talk to us about his experiences converting an Ruby on Rails app from MRI Ruby to JRuby:

Starting from a scaffold Rails app with RSpec and mysql/postgresl what are the steps to get rspec to pass on JRuby:

use .rvmrc to switch between MRI and JRuby
switch out gems (db, server side js, factory_girl 3 vs. 2)
require_relative => use proper load path
using 1.9 compatible mode for new style hashes
waiting for rspec takes longer …
use JRuby to connect to a Java lib (e.g. HBase jar) :-)

Pub

Whatever we end up doing during the formal part of the meeting, we know it has to end by 8pm. After that we head over to The Slaughtered Lamb fore more fun. Attending the talks isn’t mandatory for attendance of the pub, so if you can’t make the talks you really should come along for the pub.

The nice folks at Yammer are sponsoring some drinks behind the bar, so it’s an even better idea to come along.

Registration

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?

March 2012 Meeting

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The March 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th 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

TDD Fishbowl

Stuart Eccles, fresh from talking about Conan the Deployer at our February Meeting, has offered to organise a Fishbowl session focussing on approaches to TDD.

The idea is not to focus on tedious tool debates like Test::Unit vs. RSpec or Cucumber vs. raw ruby for integration testing; these debates have rang throughout the ages and will continue to do so. We want to explore other debates, such as Obie Fernandez’s suggestion that TDD might not be the best approach for early-stage startups.

The format on the night will be that we’ll have a couple of short opening statements from the panel to seed the discussion and then get going on the discussion. The fishbowl format means that we have 5 chairs at the front, 1 of which is empty. People on the chairs can speak, and if someone from the audience wants to add something to the conversation, they can go up and take the empty chair. As soon as this happens, one of the original panelists must go and sit down.

The initial panel will be:

Stuart Eccles - Writing tests before validating the business value is pointless
Tom Stuart - Rails encourages you to to TDD wrong
Joseph Wilk - The cargo culting of TDD without considering if and why
Tom Stuart - The “fast specs” paradigm is a red herring for producing better code

Murray Steele will act as moderator, but anyone can get involved by claiming the empty fifth chair.

Pub

It’ll probably be a lively debate, and we’ll want to carry on after 8pm. We do this by heading over to The Slaughtered Lamb where we can continue in more informal settings. If you can’t make the talks you really should come along for the pub.

Registration

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?

February 2012 Meeting

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

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
Jairo Diaz: “Tech interns” - How to get more qualified interns into Ruby.
Stuart Eccles: Conan the deployer - capistrano extensions focussing on AWS
Richard Livsey: Breaking up is hard to do - extracting authentication code from models
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:

Jakub Šťastný: SockJS - a websocket emulation library

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?

January 2012 Meeting

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

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?

December 2011 Meeting

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

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

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?

November 2011 Meeting

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

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

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?

October 2011 Meeting

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 01:34:55 GMT

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

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?

September 2011 Meeting

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:16:41 GMT

The September 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th 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

Stories from the e-petitions front-line

Some of the team (Chris Parsons, Jolyon Pawlyn) behind the newly launched government e-petitions website will talk to us about the issues they had with scaling the site, how they solved them, and how they continue to monitor and improve the service:

A talk about caching, chef, munin, load testing and hosting. As part of its adoption of agile techniques and its creation of a Skunkworks division, DirectGov asked the Agile Delivery Network to build a successor website to the Number 10 e-petitions site with a 6 week deadline. The talk aims to highlight the measures taken to cope with high throughput, what worked and what could be done differently to avoid headlines like “Government’s e-petition website crashes on first day”.

Something else

If you’re interested in filling this slot, find out what it means and then get in touch.

Pub

The talks should finish by 8pm and after this we continue the evening in The Slaughtered Lamb, a short walk from the talk venue. If you’re not interested in the talks, or can’t make them for some reason, please do turn up to the pub. The more the merrier!

Registration

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?

August 2011 Meeting

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:59:17 GMT

The August 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th 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

Managing Web Application Servers with Puppet

Paul Mucur describes his talk as follows:

Joshua Sierles of 37signals once described configuration management as something that “doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s the single most important thing we do as sysadmins” but what is it and what do tools like Chef and Puppet offer from the point of view of a developer?

In this presentation I want to talk about how configuration management allowed me – a developer with no access to the live servers and working with system administrators in a different time zone – to not only install and configure servers quickly and in a repeatable way but also let me be confident about the consistency of each and every machine I deploy to.

Using the example of getting a server ready to run a Rails application using Puppet (and testing things out with the aid of Vagrant), I will showcase some patterns that we have developed for managing versions of Ruby with RVM, the installation of Phusion Passenger and how to deploy a database.yml when you’re not allowed to see live passwords.

Chef and Vagrant

Gareth Rushgrove is a sometimes Ruby programmer and occasional sysadmin. He curates the devopsweekly mailing list, lives in Cambridge and writes code for fun and profit.

Most developers spend far too much time managing a development environment that is different to the one they use for production applications. Different tools, different underlying libraries and different bugs. Local virtualisation provides an answer, but historically it’s been time consuming and annoying to setup and manage. Using configuration management tools like Chef to set things up, and Vagrant to easily manage the virtual machines from the command line provides modern developers the best of all possible worlds.

Cucumber-chef

[Stephen Nelson-Smith](http://agilesysadmin.net) is the author of ["Test-driven infrastructure with Chef" (published by O'Reilly)](http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920020042) and is going to talk to us about [cucumber-chef](http://www.cucumber-chef.org/): > [Cucumber-chef](https://github.com/Atalanta/cucumber-chef) is a library of tools to enable the > emerging discipline of infrastructure as code to practice test driven development. It provides a > testing platform within which [cucumber](http://cukes.info/) tests can be run which provision > lightweight virtual machines, configure them by applying the appropriate [Chef](http://www.opscode.com/chef/) > roles to them, and then run acceptance and integration tests against the environment.

Stephen had to pull out, we’ll try to reschedule him for our September meeting.

Pub

We aim to finish up the talk part of the evening by 8pm. At this point we talk a short walk to The Slaughtered Lamb to round off the evening with wine and song. If you’re unable to attend the talks, you’re more than welcome to turn up at the pub whenever you can.

Registration

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?