January 2011 Meeting
The first meeting of 2011 will be on Monday the 10th of January, 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
Sean O'Halpin - Processing Tweets at the BBC
Sean O'Halpin couldn't make our December meeting due to illness, but he's fighting fit now and is going to give his talk this month instead. He'll be telling us about some work at the BBC involving twitter:
I'll be talking about how we're using Ruby to process tweets in realtime to discover inbound links to the BBC Zeitgeist and how we're reading the Twitter Firehose (about 1000 tweets/sec = about 90 million a day) and storing the data in Amazon S3.
There'll be a bit about Hadoop and Map/Reduce too.
A video of Sean's talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on the Skills Matter site.
Matthew Rudy Jacobs: "Building a financial app in ruby and rails, and all the gems I made along the way"
Matthew has been living it up in Hong Kong for the past year and will be making a brief stop at our humble meeting to explain some of the work he's been doing there in building a financial application. He promises to cover at least some of these things:
- big ints and careful rounding
- locking strategy
- state machines
- currency handling
- secure server configuration with chef
- data security
- satisfying businessy types
A video of Matthew's talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on the Skills Matter site.
"Analogue Blog"
At the start of the meetings, and during laptop faffing between talks we leave the floor open for the audience. The idea is that if there's something you want to say to the group (announce you're team is hiring, let people know about a new gem you've written, point out a new conference, ask for help on a personal project, whatever really…) then this is the time to do it. Just keep it short, if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.
Pub
We'll see in the New Year after the meeting with a couple of drinks at The Slaughtered Lamb which is only a five minute walk from Skills Matter's offices. We aim to finish the meeting at around 8pm, so if you can't make the more formal part of the evening head to the pub then and you'll find us nattering over a pint.
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.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but be aware this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attending. It's just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Jan 04, 2011