February 2010 Meeting
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:
Rails & iPhone integration
Paul will talk to us about Rails & iPhone integration.
Using Websockets with EventMachine
Using Websockets with EventMachine.
Show Off!
Joel will talk about Show Off; ruby-based HTML presentation software (this talk might get a bit meta).
Evolution of data models in rails
Evolution of data models in Rails. Lessons learned.
Bowline - a ruby GUI framework
Bowline - Alex has been building a ruby GUI framework and wants to show it off.
An intro to birdpie.com
birdpie.com - Anup will introduce the site and the architecture behind it; Rails 3.0, Redis, and Resque.
Rack::Cache
All about Rack::Cache and associated things.
Decorating the domain
Decorating the domain - Wrapping polymorphic presentation logic around the model.
Some rough fibrous material
The mailing list suggested that Murray talk about Fibers in Ruby 1.9.
"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