March 2011 Meeting
The March 2011 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 7th of March, 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
James Coglan: Primer
James Coglan is going to talk to us about Primer his caching system for rails:
It's no secret that expiring caches is hard. But it's also tedious, error-prone, and it forces a lot of duplication as your sweeper code is tightly coupled to how your views work. And caching itself introduces complexity: by caching data, you're creating multiple ways to compute the same value.
What if we could get rid of all this? I'm going to take a look at Primer, a Rails extension I've been working on that means you'll never write another cache sweeper. With a handful of mixins, you can keep writing your views the way you like and Primer will deal with keeping them snappy. You'll see how you can use ActiveRecord's reflections to automate a lot of caching work, how to regenerate your views offline using worker processes, and how to add real-time updates to your pages, all with code you could write during your coffee break.
Chris Parsons: Lessons learned BDD-ing a command-line utility gem
Also known as: "end to end is harder than you think". Chris Parsons describes this talk as follows:
In this talk Chris will take us through how he test-drove the development of a command line utility built as a gem, designed to connect to servers via SSH and HTTP. We'll discuss the use of Aruba for command line testing in cucumber, how to deal with external connections, and how to discover your service interfaces as you build the client.
Pub
After all this we'll head to The Slaughtered Lamb to while away the rest of the evening in more informal settings. The pub is only a five minute walk from Skills Matter's offices and we'll be there from about 8pm onwards. If you're unable to make it on time for the main meeting then feel free to join us for the pub-bit.
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 Feb 15, 2011