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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
Stuart Eccles: Conan the deployer - capistrano extensions focussing on AWS
Richard Livsey: Something on MonogoDB or something on removing authentication from your models (separation of concerns)
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:

Jairo Diaz: “Tech interns” - How to get more qualified interns into Ruby.
Jon Leighton: Poltergeist - a js driver for capybara
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?

July 2011 Meeting

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:51:26 GMT

The July 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th of July, 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

It’s unintentional, but it looks like we have a theme this month of using ruby to build high-profile applications for large organizations.

Building a prototype site for the UK government

Some of the team behind alphagov, the new prototype for a UK government website will talk about the ruby they’ve used in delivering the site, and some of the lessons learned.

Extracting value from legacy applications using Ruby

Jairo Diaz and John Small will be talking to us about the rails application they have developed for a large UK retailer and how they overcame some of the challenges along the way.

Pub

After these talks we’ll make the short trip from Skills Matter’s offices to the more informal surroundings of The Slaughtered Lamb. If you can’t make it to the main meeting, you’ll find us crowding the bar from around 8pm onwards. The pub part of the meeting is very social and is a perfect opportunity to engage the speakers in more in-depth questions raised by their talks. Or just talk about the latest trending topics on twitter. It’s your call.

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?

June 2011 Meeting

Mon, 23 May 2011 02:03:20 GMT

The June 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th 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. 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

Here’s My Gem

The plan for this month’s meeting is to have several local rubyists talk about gems that they have written. To let them give their gem a wider audience, and to show off that the LRUG community is a prolific bunch. Confirmed so far:

Paul Battley - htmlentities - HTMLEntities is a simple library to facilitate encoding and decoding of named or numerical entities in HTML and XHTML documents.
Ismael Celis - hash_mapper, jbundle, or anisoptera
Paul Fedory - RolePlay - RolePlay is a simple gem that provides roles for ActiveRecord objects (typically a user model, giving them the role of administrator or moderator. As well as covering RolePlay, Paul will also cover tips for upgrading gems to have Rails 3 compatibility.
Phil Nash - Asset Hat - Asset Hat deals with asset optimisation once Rails has done it’s job, getting your assets from your server to your user faster.
Andrew Nesbitt - Split - Rack based split testing framework
Matthew Sadler - http_tools - A fast-as-possible pure Ruby HTTP parser plus associated lower level utilities to aid working with HTTP and the web.
Tom Stuart - Matahari - A test-spy library, inspired by Mockito and RR

Pub

As is usual we’ll decamp from Skills Matter’s offices to The Slaughtered Lamb for a drink or two after the talks. It’s only a short walk away so we’ll be there from about 8pm onwards. If you can’t make the main meeting then feel free to pitch up just for the pub-bit. There’s usually some rubyists there until closing time, so you’re bound to find someone to talk to no matter what time you make it over.

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?

May 2011 Meeting

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 09:48:48 GMT

The May 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th 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. 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

Andrew McDonough : Ruby Golf

Andrew McDonough is going to lead a practical evening called “Ruby Golf”. He describes it as follows:

I started my career as a perl programmer. Perl, like ruby has a lot of ‘syntactic sugar’ to help developers write concise code. Perl programmers sometimes play a game known as ‘Perl Golf’ to explore the lesser-known features of the language. The aim of ‘perl golf’ is to solve a problem using the fewest characters possible.

At this month’s meeting Andrew will run a practical evening based around ‘ruby golf’, an adaptation of perl golf for ruby developers. People will be asked to form teams of 4-8 people, and solve nine short ruby golf ‘holes’ using as few characters as possible. Each hole will be defined by a set of RSpec examples describing a single method, and the teams must write the method to pass all of the examples. At the end, the solutions will be scored and the winning team will be announced.

This evening should have something for everyone; beginners can pick up some language tricks and learn how to write code to pass tests, while experienced ruby developers will have the opportunity to show off their skills and compete with their peers.

Note: This is going to be a full evening of practical activity. We’ll break up into small groups on the night to go through what Andrew has prepared. You should bring your laptop so you can play along. Don’t worry if you don’t know anyone, there will be plenty of groups to join in on the night. Also, you should sign up to the mailing list to find out about any further instructions.

Pub

After all this golfing we’ll make the short trip to The Slaughtered Lamb for our 19th hole. We normally finish up the meetings at around 8pm, and are in the bar by 8:05pm. If you can’t make the main meeting (but you really should try, it’ll be a great way to flex your ruby muscles and learn about short-cuts you never knew existed) don’t feel like you can’t come along just for the pub part; you’d be more than welcome.

Registration

Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we’ve had to turn away people who haven’t registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It’s better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don’t forget MINASWAN), so please do register.

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?