Meetings
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.
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.
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Apr 24, 2008
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:
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Mar 16, 2008
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Feb 19, 2008
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:
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Jan 25, 2008
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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Jan 14, 2008