The February meeting will be on Wednesday the 10th of February, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a great new space and we there won't be the problems we've had in the past with fitting people in, but you should still register early to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
Lightning talks!
This month we're having our annual lightning talk evening. If you've not been to one of these before it's quite simple; we have lots of short talks all on one night. We use the 20x20 format for our talks which means that each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-transition after 20 seconds, this gives them 6 minutes 40 seconds to get their point across. It's a really fun way to run a lightning talk event, and the rigid time constraints mean that the talks tend to be really entertaining (jettisoning for brevity things like explanations or support for the speakers opinions).
The current line-up of 20x20-ers is as follows:
"Analogue Blog"
Depending on how many lighning talks there are, we may have time at the start of the meeting for 10-15 minutes of free time for anyone to speak. You don't need to ask for permission or let us know in advance that you have something to say here, just turn up, stand up and say it! It's a forum for announcements, or pleas for help, or a soapbox for starting discussions. Just remember not to run on for too long as there's probably other people that want to say something too (it would also be embarrassing if you ran on for longer than our scheduled lightning talks!).
Pub
The meeting will finish around 8pm and we'll be in a local pub shortly thereafter. The pub we tried after the last meeting was The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes walk from Skills Matter's new office. If you can't make it for the main meeting consider, coming along as an advance guard to the pub and securing us some tables.
Registration
Registration isn't mandatory as Skills Matter's new office has plenty of space. That said, you really should register as it lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly and means you'll get a name badge so people know who you are. If there aren't enough seats, people without name badges will have to sit on the floor. 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 Jan 21, 2010
The first meeting of LRUG in 2010 will be on Wednesday the 13th of January, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a bright new space and we shouldn't have any problems with fitting people in, but you should still register your attendance early to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
Symbol vs. String
Julian Burgess fresh from his special guest hosting of the December meeting is going to step once more into the spotlight, but this time he's going to give us a talk:
When I first started down the road of learning Ruby I had no idea what
a symbol was. Gradually I've learnt to the point that I believe I can
identify cases where using a symbol will be a good idea (saving memory
and speed) and cases where it would be a bad idea (eating up all your
memory).
The talk would be pretty short, I might say something which is
completely wrong so will rely on the crowd to correct me. The goal
being at the end for everyone in the room to understand and love the symbol.
Note: Description borrowed from his Ruby Manor proposal. You can check the thread to see what other things people asked for that he might cover.
Julian couldn't make it because of inclement weather. However, we had a replacement in the shape of:
Dragonfly
Mark Evans gave us an overview of a new file attachment gem he'd written called Dragonfly. The interesting thing about this gem is that rather than specifying the thumbnail sizes at the model level, you specify them at the point at which you want to use them in the view and leave it up to caching to deal with performance.
Thanks to Mark for stepping in at the last minute!
A video of Mark's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
An update on Redcar
Daniel Lucraft is going to talk to us about Redcar, the Ruby IDE he's been writing. Daniel first talked to us about it in March last year and he wants to give us an update on how it's been going since then. He recently released 0.3 and is looking for interested rubyists to play start hacking on it.
A video of Daniel's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
"Analogue Blog"
We'll start the meeting with 10-15 minutes of free time for anyone to speak. You don't need to ask for permission or let us know in advance that you have something to say here, just turn up, stand up and say it! It's a forum for announcements, or pleas for help, or a soapbox for starting discussions. Just remember not to run on for too long as there's probably other people that want to say something too.
Pub
We aim to finish up the meeting by 8pm, after which we mosey on down to ... well ... we're not sure. Skills Matter's new office isn't close to our old preferred pub, so we're going to have to find a new one. We've organised a special LRUG Nights to do just that. Watch this space to find out what pub we choose (or come along on the 6th to help us choose!). Regardless of what pub we choose, if for any reason you can't make the talks it's fine to come along just for the pub part of the meeting.
Registration
Registration isn't mandatory as Skills Matter's new office has plenty of space. However, registration lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly and if you don't register you might have to sit on the floor. It's also polite to let people know if you're coming. 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 Dec 17, 2009
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 9th of December, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, at our new venue The Crypt (it's very close to our previous venues). Despite the new venue it's still important for people to register so Skills Matter know how many people to expect and set the room up correctly.
Agenda
DDD (Domain Driven Design)
Alex Young is going to talk about DDD. Chances are his talk will be based on a comment he made on the mailing list:
I also think that of the major Ruby ORM libraries, only Sequel is really
aligned with DDD in the first place, so if you're using anything else you've
already compromised the model (although again, possibly that's a discussion
for another time).
A video of Alex's talk can be found on the Skills Matter site.
Javascript Stories: The Animal, Mineral or Vegetable guide to testing javascript in web applications.
Rob Holland describes his talk as follows:
The talk will cover how to use capybara with
cucumber to easily write and run stories including javascript
functionality. The talk should be useful to people who don't currently test their
javascript, or those who are already doing so with another framework.
A video of Rob's talk can be found on the Skills Matter site.
"Analogue Blog"
At the start of each meeting we have 10-15 minutes set aside for anyone in the room to speak. It's run "open" style, so you don't need to ask for permission, just stand up and say something. In the past we've had new site announcements, gem demos, new framework announcements, overviews of recent conferences; basically anything you might post a link to on something like Ruby Flow, you should think about mentioning here.
Pub
We aim to finish up the meeting by 8pm, after which we mosey on down to The Crown Tavern to continue the evening. If for any reason you can't make the talks feel free to come along to the pub and mix with your fellow rubyists. In fact, if you get there early, you can get the first drinks in!
Registration
Registration isn't mandatory as there's always room in the venue on the night, however, registration lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly so if you don't register you might have to sit on the floor. 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 Nov 22, 2009
