November 2009 Meeting

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 11th of November, 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

We're hoping for a "Ruby in Sys Admin" theme this month.

John Arundel: Is Your Sysadmin Dumber Than a Hamster? How to automate your sysadmin out of a job, and into a more interesting job.

John offered to do a talk about Puppet and Chef covering some or more of the following topics:

  • Why aren't sysadmins as smart as developers?
  • How do you build 100 servers in a day?
  • How to automate the dumb stuff
  • Why it's quicker to do things more slowly
  • How to convince your boss you need an automated infrastructure
  • Why automation gives you staging and continuous integration for free

A video of John's talk is available on the Skills Matter site and his slides can be found on Slideshare.

Julian Simpson: Drunken Build Monkey

Julian Simpson has seen things. Scary things. In a career that has spanned 15 years of Unix systems administration with detours into continuous integration and build management, he's seen quite a lot. By day he works in a Ruby on Rails development team in London. By night he blogs about CI as The Build Doctor. In this talk he's going to discuss testing infrastructure before you deploy it, more Puppet, declarative systems, CI, and top tips for developers who want to get code into production and still have time to go to the pub afterwards.

A video of Julian's talk is available on the Skills Matter site and his slides can be found on Slideshare.

"Analogue Blog"

At the start of each meeting we have 10-15 minutes set aside for people to speak about anything they think is of interest to the group. It's "open" style, so you don't need to ask for permission, just turn up and say something. In the past we've had overviews of recent conferences, discussions of alternative JS frameworks for Rails, announcements about new events, calls for help reviewing patches for Rails, a quick demo of a new gem. Basically anything you might post a link to on something like Ruby Flow, you should think about mentioning here.

Pub

At the end of the meeting we like to head over to The Crown Tavern for a spot of socialising over a beer or two. We're usually at the pub from about 8:00pm ish so if you don't think you can make the "proper" meeting feel free to come along just for the pub. It's fine to turn up to the meeting late though, you don't have to be there at 6:30 to get 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 Oct 19, 2009