The September meeting will be on Monday the 13th 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
Rails 3 Internals
Priit Tamboom would like to talk about Rails 3 internals:
Recently I have been porting an app into Rails 3 and probably you have
also been poking this new Rails 3 with ruby 1.9.2.
Therefore I would like to discuss a bit more about Rails 3 itself.
Particularly, things under railties lib directory covering classes
such as Railtie, Engine, Application and will go through
initialization with initializers.
Along the way I'll show some examples how you can use this knowledge
in your own gem or plugin.
Nothing too fancy but should be useful for developing your next Rails
3 project.
Asynchronous interfaces
Alex MacCaw will talk about moving state to the client side as opposed to the more traditional request/response model. He'll go through the various options, such as Syncro (the successor to Juggernaut), and SuperApp (his JS framework).
"Analogue Blog"
We start the meetings with announcements for the group. If there's something you think the group should know, or something you're looking for help with, this is the time to say it. You don't have to ask for permission, just get up and say your piece. Just keep it short so you don't eat into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.
Pub
When all the talking is over we break ranks and head out for some beer. Our chosen pub The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes from the Skills Matter office. The main meeting finishes around 8pm and you'll find us joslting for service at the bar shortly after. If you don't think you can make it for the talks, you should come along for the beers, as the talks are really just an excuse for going to the pub afterwards.
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.
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Aug 25, 2010
The August meeting will be on Monday the 9th 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
Making old projects better
Tim Cowlishaw and Chris O'Sullivan have been working together on an older project of theirs and want to share some things they've learned about making it a nicer project to work on.
Most of us want better software development processes, and spend a lot of
time reading and talking about methods for making better software. However,
when you've already been working on a project for a long time, entropy can
get the better of you, making it difficult to adapt your working practices.
We've been working on a project like this that started 18 months ago, and
over the last few months have been steadily improving how we go about things,
getting better at BDD and Scrum, and starting to do a bit of Domain Driven
Design. We're going to talk about how we got on, focusing in equal parts on
refactoring legacy code bases, improving test coverage, and improving
processes, as well as revealing the incredible powers of suggestion we
employed to convince stakeholders, management and sundry doubters that this
was a good idea.
Tom Crinson will talk about Cramp and some of the other technologies he's used in his HTML5 Bomberman clone. Tom says:
You'll find out how and why I use cramp to cope with hundreds of simultaneous
players on ittybittyboom.com. Cramp is an asynchronous
event driven ruby based framework based upon event machine that allows the coder to
write succinct, clear code to deal with hundreds or thousands of tcp connections at once.
"Analogue Blog"
Our meetings start with a short period where we make announcements about things going on in the community. If you have something you think the rest of the group might want to know about; an event, a new gem, a blog post, a company that's hiring or even just to introduce yourself, then this is the time and place to do it. The only rules are that you can't go on about it, we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.
Pub
After the talks we head on over to the more informal surroundings of The Slaughtered Lamb to finish the evening with a beer and maybe a fish-finger sandwich. If you can't make it to for the talks, we'll be heading to the pub at around 8pm, so we can see you there.
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.
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Jul 15, 2010
The July meeting will be on Monday the 12th 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
Carat: An interpreted language, written in Ruby
Jonathan Leighton has recently completed a project for his third year at University, which he thinks we might be interested in:
I ended up writing an interpreter, in Ruby, for a language
heavily inspired by Ruby. A sort of distilled Ruby-like language which
is far too simplistic to be useful and probably overlooks tonnes of
important things.
But anyway! The point is not really that the language is utterly
pointless. The point is that it's an interpreter written in a very
high-level language, which I think it relatively easy to understand.
So I'm offering to do a talk which would take the listener through the
workings of this interpreter. The parsing is done with Treetop, although
I wouldn't propose really talking about the parsing at all as I think a
lot of people are quite familiar with Treetop.
I might as well finish with some buzzwords. If you ever wondered what
"trampoline function" or "continuation passing style" means then this is
your chance :)
For those who like spoilers you can see the code on github and read Jonathan's final year report about the project
ActionEmbedding
Phil Cowans has recently been working on a rails plugin called ActionEmbedding, and he'd like to show it to us:
ActionEmbedding is a simple Rails plugin I've been using to look at
ways of building up pages from independent user interface elements
called pagelets. The idea is to implement a number of different patterns,
including Hierarchical MVC, and make it as easy as possible to switch
between them. I'll try to explain why I think this is a good idea, show
you what the plugin can do at the moment and talk about how I see it evolving.
"Analogue Blog"
We start the meeting with a short amount of time where anyone in the room can make an announcement. In the past few months it's mostly been the LRUG job board, but that's not all we want people to talk about. If you've written some fancy new gem and want to tell people about it, this is the time and place to do it. If you read a controversial article about some aspect of ruby that you want to draw people's attention to, this is a great time to mention it. If you've got your finger on the pulse and know about some new hack day or other geek event, this is the room full of people you should mention it to. The rules are simple, you just have to be quick.
Pub
We aim to finish up the formal proceedings of the evening at 8pm. After that we head to a local pub, The Slaughtered Lamb, and have some beers and a chat. If you fancy some lively ruby discussion, but you can't make it for 6:30 you are more than welcome to head straight to the pub. Just look for a group of people wildly debating the syntax of the latest version of RSpec and you'll have found the right group.
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.
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Jul 05, 2010
