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July 2009 Meeting

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:59:44 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 8th of July, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, this time at a new venue The Crypt (it's very close to the other venues). We still need people to register though to make sure the room is set up properly.

Agenda

Do Mix Your Drinks

Tom Stuart will be talking about how abstract algebra is useful for Ruby programmers, both when writing everyday programs and when going to the pub afterwards. As an example he'll show how to use his VectorSpace library to compare and manipulate structured data for free.

Ruby+Arduino

Tomasz Wegrzanowski will be giving a talk that he describes as follows:

Arduino is an inexpensive Open Source physical computing platform which makes building interactive gadgets of your design much easier on the hardware side. Now let's add some Ruby so programming those gadgets becomes easy too...

Pub

After the meeting it's usual to continue the meeting in a more informal style at The Crown Tavern. This pub is just down the street from our new venue, in fact you'd have to walk past it on the way to the tube station, so it's hard to avoid. Speaking of avoiding things, if you can't make the main meeting, we aim to be in the pub from about 8pm and you're more than welcome to come along and help us prop up the bar.

Registration

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 2009 Meeting

Tue, 19 May 2009 01:39:32 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of June, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at either their offices or one of their overflow venues. The venue we get is dependent on how many people register and the availability of sponsorship to pay for a larger room. Do your bit by registering early.

Agenda

RDF in Rails

Patrick Sinclair will be talking about publishing RDF from Rails and getting the community to participate in Linked Data.

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

DSL Or A Code Smell...

Abdel A. Saleh recently ran a code review of a DSL he was writing at work. He's going to let us know what he learned from that experience:

DSLs are very powerful tools but are they always necessary? This is a tale in code about my work on a small 'Request Throttling' library where I thought I needed a DSL but it turned out I was sorely mistaken. I'll highlight some common DSLing techniques and the decisions that steered me away from them.

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

2 Apps, 1 Test : Distributed Ruby Unit Testing

Tom Lea has a distributed testing framework called Drunit that he's going to tell us about. Drunit (from the Readme) is:

A library for running tests across multiple applications from a single test case.

and, crucially:

Over 14% more awesome than a bag of chips.

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

Pub

At the end of all this we like to drop our polite facade and scramble to be first at the bar and woe betide anyone that gets in our way. The pub we head to is The Crown Tavern, which is conveniently located close to all of the venues that Skills Matter provide. If the main meeting doesn't fit with your hectic schedule surely you can fit in a pint on the way home? We aim to finish up the talks at 8pm, so come to the pub for then and chat with your local ruby community.

Registration

We need people to register with Skills Matter if they are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter know how many people to expect to turn up and plan the venue accordingly. If enough people register we need to book a larger venue, but that can take some time so Skills Matter need some notice to do so. So please register as early as you can. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don't want that!

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 2009 Meeting

Tue, 05 May 2009 09:23:59 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 18th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at their offices. The room is currently at capacity, but if you register with them they'll put you on a waiting list.

Agenda

Ruby FFI

Sean O'Halpin will be talking about Ruby FFI, probably using his FFI-ncurses gem to provide some examples.

Treetop

Roland Swingler has been looking at Treetop:

Regular expressions are great but they're unreadable when complex, and there are some things they just can't do. The alternative is to build a language parser - but that's really hard, isn't it? In this talk, I'll try and dispell that idea and show how building little languages in ruby is really simple. I'll show two examples: defining a mini-language from scratch to build XMPP bots, and using it as part of your screen-scraping toolbox.

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

Scheme

James Coglan is writing a Scheme interpreter in Ruby:

Scheme is a member of the Lisp family of languages, and is an excellent place to start if you're interested in writing your own language. It's small and simple to parse, yet has several advanced features that are only now becoming mainstream. Based on Heist, my main interpreter project, I present a brief overview of Scheme and use Treetop to create a small runtime that includes booleans, integer arithmetic, variables, user-defined functions, conditionals, recursion and lexical closures.

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

Pub

It's tradition at LRUG to head to the local pub after the talks to relax and chat with other rubyists. We go to The Crown Tavern which is a short walk from either of the venues Skills Matter provides. If you can't make the main meeting you'll find plenty of rubyists propping up the bar from about 8:00pm onwards after the talks. Come along!

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come (or even just thinking about it). Please register as early as you can. In fact, go and do it now! The reason for this is that if a lot of folk want to come we obviously need a larger room and Skills Matter need about a week's notice to book it. They'll only do so if the registrations dictate it. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don't want that!

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 2009 Meeting

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:05:57 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 20th of April, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at their overflow venue (if you've never been you can use this handy map to find it). On very busy nights we've had to turn people away, so make sure that you do register your attendance early to avoid this.

Agenda

There was a very positive response to the February lightning talk meeting, but organising eight or nine speakers is a bit of a hassle, so we're going to try out having three shorter talks instead of two longer ones. The Guinea Pig talks for this are:

Ruby Invoicing Framework Gem

Martin Kleppmann is the author of the invoicing gem (on GitHub) and is going to give a talk about it. The invoicing gem provides a solid basis for any commercial web app, by solving the standard problems of financial transactions neatly and concisely, allowing you to focus on the business logic, and being flexible enough to grow and handle pretty complex stuff when you need it: multi-currency support, international taxation and reseller networks, for example. Under the hood it's basically a full accrual accounting system, but that is hidden behind a clean Ruby API which requires no accounting knowledge. Martin will also touch on OAccounts, an initiative to create an open standard for exchanging accounting data between different apps.

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

A Modular Approach to Views

Jon Gilbraith has been working on taking a modular approach to views and creating builder classes to abstract structural html and view logic into Ruby blocks. In this talk he's going to present that approach and some of the stuff he's learnt along the way.

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

Using Geokit in Social Apps

Paul Jensen is going to give a talk about using Geokit, with a particular focus on it's use in Social Apps. Geokit is a rubygem and Rails plugin for geocoding, distance calculation, location finding, and ip address-based lookup. In this talk he'll run through the functionality provided by Geokit, and show off the magic in action with a google maps/twitter/trusted places mashup.

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

Pub

After three talks it's likely we'll need some kind of liquid comfort. Luckily there's a convenient pub just a short walk from either of the Skills Matter venues: The Crown Tavern. We aim to finish the talks and be crowding the bar by about 8:00pm. If you can't make it to the main meeting you should use this info to turn up at about 7:50pm and get the drinks in.

Mine's a Franziskaner.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. You should register as early as you can, so do so now! If we need a big room Skills Matter need about a week to book it, and will only do so if the registrations dictate it, so registering late means you might get put on a waiting list or turned away. And we don't want that.

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 2009 Meeting

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:32:27 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of MArch, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, either at their offices or their overflow venue, depending on the number of registrations. On very busy nights we've had to turn people away, so make sure that you do register your attendance early to avoid this.

Agenda

Redcar: Ruby, Gnome and Textmate

Daniel Lucraft has been building Redcar for some time now and wants to talk about it:

Redcar is a programmer's text editor for Gnome, written in Ruby. In this talk I'll show off Redcar's features, and then take a look into how it's implemented. We'll also look at the Ruby-GNOME2 bindings, and how to interface Vala (a C# like language) with Ruby for performance.

Daniel's even hoping to push his first milestone release of Redcar just before the meeting. You can track his progress on the Redcar lighthouse project.

Cucumber, Celerity, & FireWatir

Aidy Lewis is going to give a talk about testing:

The talk will explain Story-Driven-Development(SDD) and its benefits. A sample application will be built in real-time using SDD with Rspec Cucumber. Tests will be run in-browser with FireWatir and through a headless-browser using Celerity and JRuby.

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

Pub

It's tradition that after the talks we descend on The Crown Tavern, and make it difficult for anyone to get served at the bar for about 20 minutes. This pub is very close to Skills Matter, and only a short stumble across Clerkenwell "Green" from the overflow venue if we're using it, and therefore is perfect for our post-meeting activities. The meeting normally wraps up at about 8:00pm, so if you can't make it to that but still want to talk ruby, you'll find plenty of rubyists in this pub. Come along!

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. As we mentioned above, they need us to register for fire-regulations and making sure we get the best sized room for the number of attendees.

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 2009 Meeting

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:28:32 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of February, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, either at their offices or their overflow venue, depending on the number of registrations. So make sure that you do register your attendance to help them choose and so you can be let into the venue.

Agenda

Lightning Talks

This month (just like we did last February) we're going to have a series of lightning talks in the 20x20 slide format. For those who didn't attend last year, or aren't familiar with the format is: the presenter has 20 slides which are displayed for 20 seconds each, giving a total presentation time of 6:40. Last year it was a really fun evening as we got to hear about a load of different stuff and with only 6:40 in which to get their point across the presenters maybe didn't have enough time to fully justify their positions. It made for some interesting questions at the end!

Those brave volunteers are:

Tom Armitage - His Twit 4 Dead bots (Francis, Louis, Zoey & Bill). Video filmed by Skills Matter (or gvideo).
Julian Burgess - A cry for help - an anti talk?
Steve Ganly - "rubysmokes" - A proposal for smoke testing ruby
Richard Livsey - All the ruby that's fit to merge: Rails 3.0 & Merb 2.0
Chris Lowis - Ruby and the GNU Scientific Library and/or R. Video filmed by Skills Matter (or gvideo).
Matt Patterson - A talk about dpkg-tools. Video filmed by Skills Matter (or gvideo).
Thomas Pomfret - Ruby and XMPP. Video filmed by Skills Matter (or gvideo).
Roland Swingler - Something about rubygame. Video filmed by Skills Matter (or gvideo).
Tom ten Thij - Debugging with ruby-debug. Video filmed by Skills Matter (or gvideo).

Pub

After that many presentations there's bound to be a lot to talk about, so we'll make our way to The Crown Tavern. This pub is really close to either of the venues we use for our meetings and is perfect for a post-meeting chat and drink. If you can't make it to the meeting, but still fancy some ruby chat, just head along to the pub and we'll be the ones crowding the bar from about 8:00pm onwards.

Registration

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.

January 2009 Meeting

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:27:12 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of January, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Skills Matter are hosting us as usual in their offices, but you'll need to register your attendance for them to let you in.

Agenda

Couch DB

Paul Carey has been tinkering with CouchDB for a while and has even written a ruby library called RelaxDB for it. In his talk he's going to cover both of those things.

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

Abstractions For Website APIs

Paul Mison is going to do a short talk on libraries and abstractions for website APIs. Specifically how he thinks they should be written (and how he thinks they shouldn't be). The talk will mostly focus on Flickr, so an understanding of Flickr's API and the existing abstractions might be of use.

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

Pub

There's always time for a drink after the meeting and we usually head to The Crown Tavern which is just round the corner from the venue. If you can't make it to the talks part of the evening, the pub should be overflowing with ruby chat from about 8:00pm onwards, so come along!

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. They need us to register for fire-regulations and making sure we get the best sized room for the number of attendees.

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.

December 2008 Meeting

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:59:31 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of December, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter have provided their overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green for this meeting because of the number of registrations. They still want you to register your attendance though, so you can be let into the venue.

Agenda

Javascript Testing

Chris O'Sullivan loves testing, and it's been eating away at him that he can't test the javascript he writes for his rails apps. In this talk he'll be showing off how he finally worked out how to test this stuff and return to the shores of Testingland.

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

Ruby Vs. The World

Matthew Rudy Jacobs has been comparing Ruby against how other languages do similar things. In this talk he's going to present his findings and suggest some things that as Rubyists we might learn from our alternate language using brethren.

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

Pub

At the end of all things, one fact will be carved upon the smouldering husk that was once this earth. That fact shall read:

After each LRUG meeting, the assembled masses did reconvene at The Crown Tavern, but a short distance from the original meeting point, and from there did imbibe boozes. All were welcome, even those who couldn't make the main talks. And there was much rejoicing in the tavern."

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows Skills Matter to organise the most appropriate room for the number of people coming. In the past we've had to turn people away who didn't register because the room was full and there was no room for extra bodies. We don't like having to do that, so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room) and secure your place.

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.

November 2008 Meeting

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:58:55 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of November, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will choose the most appropriate venue based on the number of registrations. Going on past meetings it'll be either in Skills Matter's offices or their overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. Please do register your attendance early to help them choose the right venue.

Agenda

Packet Sniffing

James Darling has recently been hacking about with the Shazam iPhone app and the Last.fm API in an attempt to scrobble his vinyl listening habits. Along the way he used a ruby packet sniffing tool. In this short talk he's going to show off the packet sniffer and the end-to-end hack he came up with.

A video of James's talk (actually presented by Chris Mear due to illness), filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.

One code-base, Many projects

Jason Cale offered to run a talk / discussion on how to cope with evolving a single project into a maintainable code-base for multiple projects. That's not a great distilation of his idea, so here are his words:

The basic premise of what I have now is a (yet another) custom CMS / E-commerce system that an agency commissioned me to build ..

The system serves both flash websites (via restful apis), and a couple of html based ones .. I'm currently trying to work out the best way to keep a single code base that can serve present development, and future ones .. be flexible and 'hackable' and maintainable .. at the moment its a mix of plugins, config files and theme based extensions.

I certainly don't have all the answers .. but with a bit of research I could present what I've come up with so far, other ideas I've come across (most things online I've found just mention it is hard) and then open it up for discussion.

At the moment instead of it being 'lessons learned' etc, it would still be very present tense, because these problems are ones I'm still working through.

Jason might post on the mailing list before the meeting some of his ideas to help stimulate the discussion part of his talk. So if you are intersted make sure you watch out for his mails.

A video of Jasons talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.

Pub

Once the hullabaloo of the talks is over with we finish up the evening with a couple of drinks in The Crown Tavern which is just a short walk from the venue. If you can't make it for the talks you can still make it down to catch up on all the gossip.

Registration

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.

October 2008 Meeting

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:55:21 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of October, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will choose the most appropriate venue based on the number of registrations. Going on past meetings it'll be either in Skills Matter's offices or their overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. Please do register your attendance early to help them choose the right venue.

Agenda

Event Stream and LRUG Quiz

Steve Ganly will first talk about developing EventStream - a technique to record and playback non-idempotent requests on a web site. Initially a developers tool it also gives some interesting possibilities when used in production too.

Steve will then host the LRUG pub quiz, covering the specialist topics of Ruby, Rails and a whole cartload of stuff for geeks to chuckle over.

Pub

After the talks we head on over to a local pub, The Crown Tavern, for a thorough debriefing session. The pub is open to all, so if you can't make the talks for whatever reason, come on down to the pub and get them in early (mine's a Franziskaner, cheers!).

Registration

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.