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September 2008 Meeting

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:38:19 GMT

The September 2008 meeting of LRUG will be held on Monday 8th September, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Please register here. It will either be at Skills Matter, or their overflow venue at The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green, depending on the number of registrations.

Agenda

Top Ten Most Horrendous Ruby Hacks

Daniel Lucraft will be going through 10 horrendous ruby hacks, taken from code written by both himself and others. While he already has a number of horrible pieces of code, there's always room for more, so don't be shy, send your examples to him (dan at fluentradical dot com) and you may make the top ten!

RLisp - Lisp inside Ruby

Tomasz Wegrzanowski will be presenting a talk on his project RLisp, a Lisp dialect naturally embedded in Ruby

Pub

The talks generally are all done and dusted by 8pm, at which point we decamp to the local pub, The Crown Tavern for a spot of socialising. If you can't make the talks for whatever reason, you're always welcome to turn up just for the post-mortem in the pub.

July 2008 Meeting

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:57:52 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of July, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. It's very likely it will held be in the Skills Matter overflow venue at The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. Please do register your attendance early (see the note about registration below).

Agenda

Note: Expect more info on each of these talks as we get closer to the actual date of the meeting.

Starling + Memcached

James Cox ~~says this about his talk:~~

As part of my anti-hermitization, I'll be swinging by LRUG for possibly the first time to show off starling and why it's cool. Starling was a project born from trying to manage message queues using memcached. I'll try and explain how it came about, show how it works and figure out some ways it could be used productively.

has had to pull out due to a double booking. Stay tuned for a replacement.

RabbitMQ + Ruby

Ben Hood kindly offered to step in and talk about some work he's been doing with RabbitMQ and ruby. The outline is:

Characterize the motivations behind messaging in Ruby applications;
Touch on the current approaches that have been taken;
Look at what AMQP offers in general;
Discuss how this potential can be harnessed in a Rubyesque fashion;
Elaborate using real example on what has been developed to date and what is currently being worked on.

Acts As Xapian

Francis Irving:

I'd like to give a talk about my new Rails search engine plugin, which is called acts_as_xapian

Francis will probably also cover some of the site's he's been using xapian on, such as WhatDoTheyKnow.

Pub

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows Skills Matter to organise a larger room if we need it. For the past few meetings we've used their overflow venue and thus avoided having to turn people away because of fire-regulations. We hope to do so again so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room).

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.

June 2008 Meeting

Tue, 27 May 2008 02:17:23 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of June, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. It's likely, if enough people sign up, that it will be in the Skills Matter overflow venue at The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. However, if people don't sign up early enough we'll be in the normal 1 Sekforde St. venue. So please do register your attendance early (see the note about registration below).

Agenda

Ruby as Multimedia glue

Nick Ludlam offers up:

A talk about implementing a gem for communicating with the open source MythTV software, streaming and transcoding recordings on the fly with the aid of Mongrel, and viewing them using a custom interface written using RubyCocoa on Mac OS X. The talk will be a whistlestop tour of the various aspects of getting all this working.

Nick released the various components that he talked about on his website and on his github account.

A video of Nick's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video. His slides are also available.

Genomes On Rails

Matt Wood is going to give a talk about the work he's been doing with rails at work:

The Human Genome Project aimed to determine the entire DNA sequence of man: it was completed in 13 years after an international effort and a billion dollar budget. To further our understanding of DNA, genes, proteins and their function, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is building the next generation of high throughput sequencing, using Ruby and Rails. This talk will cover the infrastructure required to handle multi-petabyte, highly scalable systems and how we're using Rails to quickly build flexible software to support this effort.

Matt also gave a longer version of this talk at RailsConf Portland 2008 on the Sunday.

A video of Matt's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video. His slides are also available.

Pub

We'll head on over to The Crown Tavern for a drink after the talks. We aim to finish the talks at around about 8pm, so if you don't think you'll be able to make it for the talks head on over to the pub to catch up on what went on.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows SKills Matter to organise a larger room if we need it. For the past few meetings we've used their overflow venue and thus avoided having to turn people away because of fire-regulations. We hope to do so again so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room).

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.

May 2008 Meeting

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:02:38 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St.. However, depending on numbers (see the note about registration below) we might move to a larger venue.

Agenda

Settling New Caprica: getting your pet project off the ground.

Tom Armitage launched a rails forum site called New Caprica back in March after ~9 months of toil. In his own words:

On the way it's had two rewrites, I've taught myself Test:Unit, RSpec, Capistrano, and a few other things through it, and it currently has about 74% C0 coverage and a 2:1 Test:Code ratio.

I'm also pretty exhausted, and now have the joy of wrangling real users.

Anyhow, I thought there could be something fun in lessons learned, a few bits of advice I realised on the way, and perhaps a small demo of the software.

A video of Tom's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.

Monkeyweaving: Live Native Monkeypatching

Tim Becker popped up on our mailing list to offer up a talk about a new meta-programming library called weave that he'd been developing. In his own words:

weave is a library for 'live native monkey patching'. It provides a native wrapper to the C functions in the MRI Ruby implementation that are involved in creating native extensions. This allows you to swap native code in and out at runtime.

A video of Tim's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video

Pub

It's LRUG tradition to follow up the formal part of the night with a drink or two at The Crown Tavern. It's an excellent opportunity to find out what the rest of the ruby community is up to, and find people to help you out with your own pet projects. If you don't think you'll make it for the talks we're usually in the pub from about 8:00pm, so come along and don't miss out on the fun.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows SKills Matter to organise a larger room if we need it. For the past couple of meetings we've used the overflow venue, but prior to that we've had to close registration and turn people away. The larger room, close to the usual venue, needs about a weeks notice for Skills Matter to book it. Please, therefore, register now rather than later.

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

April 2008 Meeting

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:23:09 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of April, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, in ~~our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St.~~ the Skills Matter overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. However, depending on numbers (see the note about registration below) we might move to a larger venue.

Agenda

A video of the meeting, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google video (or the Skills Matter site).

Show'n'Tell

Lots of people have probably written code (be it gems, rails plugins, collections of rake tasks or little itch-scratcher scripts) that they're kinda proud of, but don't really want to pad out a 5-10 minute demo / show-off into one of our "traditional" 20-30 minute talks, so we never get to hear about it. As a community we're probably missing out on a lot of sweet ruby goodness because of that.

This month we hope to change that by running a bunch of Show'n'Tell sessions where people show off their code for 5-10 mins. There's no set idea on what you should show off: perhaps a neat function you're really proud of, perhaps a whole gem, perhaps just some .irbrc hacks that you think are super useful. Anything goes, as long as it's code.

Some people that have volunteered so far:

James Adam - soup and vanilla
Daniel Lucraft - rak
Alex MacCaw - juggernaut
Rob McKinnon - morph (slides)
Sean O'Halpin - doodle
Dan Webb - "Fiddling with god" (perhaps with a starling)

There's plenty of room for more stuff, so get in touch to volunteer something.

Pub

Exhausted and weary from all the code being thrown around we'll stumble into The Crown Tavern to try to make sense of it all. Here's where we'll hatch master plans to combine all the gems, rake tasks and scripts into a new framework for world domination. If you're not sure that you'll make it for the main meeting, but don't want to be left out of the LRUG master-plan you should definitely come along to the pub and sign up for a minor bureaucratic position in the New World Order.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration has pretty much become mandatory over the past few months to help Skills Matter with managing the rooms. Last month registrations happened early enough that Skills Matter were able to book a larger venue, however prior to that registrations haven't been timely enough and we've had to close registration and turn people away at the doors. The larger room, close to the usual venue, needs about a weeks notice for Skills Matter to book it. Please, therefore, register now rather than later.

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

March 2008 Meeting

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:16:14 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of March, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, in ~~our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St.~~ the Skills Matter overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. (See note about registration below.)

Agenda

It's entering silly season in the ruby conference year, with 9 conferences due in March and April (according to this calendar). All the speakers at this meeting are talking at one or more of these conferences.

Challenges in making Ruby run effectively on a JVM

Kresten Krab Thorup, track host and speaker at both QCon and RubyFools, will provide an overview of the issues, trade-offs and challenges in making dynamic object-oriented languages run effectively; both in general, and specifically making Ruby run well on the JVM. Kresten has many years deep knowledge of getting the most out of a JVM, and has recently been working on an research project on building yet another JVM-based virtual machine for Ruby and thus, the talk is organized around issues and findings in building this virtual machine.

A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.

mobileAct: a high-risk Rails app for Channel 4

Thomas Pomfret is going to give us a trailer version of his Scotland On Rails talk. The blurb from the conference website says:

mobileAct Unsigned is Channel 4 TV search for the best unsigned band in Britain. The site lets bands and fans to communicate and share media. In addition, users get to vote on who should win the million pound recording deal. "mobileAct: a high-risk Rails app for Channel 4" will report back on Mint's experiences building this mass-market application. In the light of recent TV voting scandals, the spotlight was on voting. In a very public arena, we had to make sure not only that the vote was fair, but that it could be seen to be fair.

So we can expect his "trailer" to cover some or all of that.

A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.

Handling Long-Running Tasks in Rails

Andrew Stewart is also talking at Scotland On Rails and so as not to be shown up by Thomas's extra preparation is also going to give us a trailer for his talk, described on the conference site as follows:

Rails is a web framework and thus designed for HTTP's synchronous request and response: you make a request to the application, the application executes it and returns the response. For your application to feel snappy its filters and actions should take no more than a few milliseconds to execute. But what do you do if you need to run a task that takes more than a few milliseconds? Perhaps ten minutes or even longer? You need to move execution off the request-response thread and onto a different one.

Rails doesn't support this out of the box and it's not obvious how to do this correctly. Happily a number of plugins fill the gap. They all work differently, though, and cater for different situations. The one you need for your application depends on your situation.

This session lays out all your options and explains where each plugin is best suited. It shows you how to work with each plugin. By the end you will be able to make an informed decision about which one you need in any given situation - and how to use it well.

We obviously can't expect a "trailer" to cover all the plugins and solutions out there, but it's bound to cover some of them.

A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.

Pub

As usual, we'll head down to The Crown Tavern after the "serious" meeting. There's usually lots of good ruby chat in the pub and it's a great opportunity to try and thrash out those thorny problems with work or personal projects. If you're not sure that you'll make it for the main meeting, you should definitely come along to the pub and meet up with us there.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration has pretty much become mandatory, as in the past few meetings we've had to close the doors after an influx of registrants over the final weekend, resulting in standing room only. Skills Matter can book a larger room, but they need much more notice in order to do so. Please, therefore, register now rather than later.

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

February 2008 Meeting

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:11:52 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th of February, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, and we'll be returning to our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

Lightning Talks

This month, we're going to have a series of lightning talks from various members of the local ruby community. To make it even more interesting, all the presentations will follow the 20x20 slide format (also known as Pecha Kucha). The presenter has 20 slides which are displayed for 20 seconds each, giving a total presentation time of 6:40. It should be a fun evening, as with only 6:40 in which to get your point across the presenters will have to be economical with their words, and possibly leave out things like justification or proof for their opinions.

We're aiming to have between 8 and 10 presenters. Those already confirmed are:

James Adam - "Rails is not the only fruit"
Richard Livsey - RSpec stories.
Rob McKinnon - "A Ruby Journey"
Daniel Tenner - Adobe Flex: what it is, why he uses it with ruby
Dafydd Rees - "When shouldn't you use a DSL? and what can you do instead?"
David Salgado - Rails deployment platforms
Roland Swingler - Pattern matching in ruby
Laurie Young - Design patterns in ruby

A video of the meeting, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or on the Skills Matter site.

QCon Ticket Raffle

The kind folk organising the QCon conference have given us a ticket to raffle off. Of immediate interest to us would be the track on ruby, but the rest of the conference seems interesting as well, with topics of interest such as agile development, new languages and domain specific languages to name just a couple of the other tracks on offer. To give away the ticket we'll do the same thing as we've done on past occasions and choose the lucky recipient from the names of the attendees on the night.

Pub

Once the excitement of the slides and ticket raffle have died down, we'll head on over to The Crown Tavern. This pub is only a couple of minutes walk from the Skills Matter offices and so is perfect for a post-meeting chat and drink. As usual, if you're not sure that you'll make it in time for the main meeting, you are more than welcome to just head along to the pub and meet up with us there.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. They need us to register so they make sure we get the most appropriately sized room, but they can only accommodate a larger than usual meeting (more than 80 folk) if they get enough notice to book a bigger room, so register now rather than later. There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring.

January 2008 Emergency Backup Meeting

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:26:08 GMT

Due to organisational problems, the proposed January Pub Quiz (we're trying to start a tradition) has been postponed until a later date. It'll probably be run in March as a special LRUG Nights.

In the interim the January emergency backup meeting is on Monday the 14th of January, from 6:30pm onwards at The Chandos pub in central London. There's no agenda, other than to mull over the recent events, new releases and gossip from the ruby community over the festive break.

See you all there.

December 2007 Meeting

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 04:27:03 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of December, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

Rails CMS Roundup

Thomas R Koll has been looking at Rails CMS solutions recently. He's going to present to us a quick review of the current crop of players: Radiant CMS, Mephisto, Goldberg and possibly others. The rest of his talk will focus on how easy it is to integrate existing sites / code into these CMS solutions based on 2 example websites that he'll integrate the CMS's into during the talk.

Slides and extra content are available here.

Ruby 1.9

Ruby 1.9 is scheduled for release around Christmas 2007 and Murray Steele decided to take a look at the development version to see what was new and exciting with this latest version of the language we all know and love. Murray's talk will draw on his findings and explain to us some of these new features and also cover the changes between ruby 1.8 and ruby 1.9.

Slides are available here.

Pub

The Crown Tavern is only a hop, skip and jump away from the Skills Matter offices and we congregate here after the talks for a drink and a chat. If you don't think you can make it for the 6:30 kick-off of the main presentation part of the evening, just come along to the pub for the socialising.

Registration

November 2007 Meeting

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:40:23 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of November, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

Building a UI framework on top of Rails

Matthew Wilson has been working on an application that has delved further and further into true 'web application' territory, and away (to some extent) from the standard RESTful one-page-per-resource object-graph-browsing application structure favoured by DHH. In order to achieve this he decided that what was needed was a widget-based UI framework that sat atop Rails. As well as showing off the resulting framework, Matthew's talk is going to focus on the experience he had in building an architecture on top of Rails.

Matt has posted some more info about his talk over at the playlouder development blog, and the slides are available from the same place.

Scripting OS X with Ruby

Matt Patterson is going to give us a whistle-stop tour of Apple's Open Scripting Architecture, which is normally hooked into through Applescript. He's then going to tell us how to get to it through Ruby and why we should care. In a final flourish, the talk will be topped off with a practical sample application munging entries in the system address book right before our very eyes.

Slides are available here.

Pub

Once the last question has been asked of our weary speakers we head to The Crown Tavern, a charming little pub located just moments from the Skills Matter office. We're a friendly bunch, so if you don't think you can make it for the talk-based part of the meeting then just pop along to the pub and say "Hi".

Registration

As usual, please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. This way they can manage seating and make sure we get the most appropriately sized room. There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring.