June 2012 Meeting
The June 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th of June, 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. Registration details are given below.
Agenda
Introduction to Elasticsearch
Frederick Cheung came back from RailsConf with two things. The first was one of the 2012 Ruby Hero awards, and the second was that he was fired up to give a talk to his local user group. Who are we to say no to a Ruby Hero? Exactly, so he's going to tell us about Elasticsearch: > Most apps need some form of search or filtering at some point > (even if they don't need full text). Elasticsearch is a new(ish) > search engine built on top of Lucene with some interesting features > that set it apart from other search engines such as sphinx or solr. > > I'll show what we've used elasticsearch for and why we picked it over > competing solutions such as solr or sphinx.
Hexagonal Rails
Matt Wynne and Steve Tooke are going to give us a version of their Hexagonal Rails talk (which they'll also be giving at SRC and Goruco later this year):
The things that make Rails great in the first few weeks of a new project are precisely what makes it hurt after a few months. Anyone who has worked on a medium-sized Rails app will have experienced pain like:
- High coupling, meaning you have to run all your tests all the time to check each change.
- Slow tests.
- Logic littered in view templates or helper modules.
Changes get more and more expensive to make, and the fun grinds to a halt. How can you stop this from happening? And more importantly, how can you turn around a project that’s already hit this wall of pain?
You need to pull your app away from Rails.
In this practical talk, we describe an architecture for mature Rails applications where the framework becomes a plug-in to your application. With hands-on demonstrations, you’ll learn how to define clear boundaries between your application’s domain and Rails’ domain. Now Rails can stick to doing what it does best – providing the persistence and HTTP stack – and your valuable business logic will be in plain old Ruby objects that are fast to test and easy to reason about.
Pub
We have to be out of the venue by 8pm, but that doesn't mean you have to go home! We wander the short distance to The Slaughtered Lamb to spend the rest of the evening chatting about the talks and what's going on in the Ruby scene in general. If there's some reason you can't make the talks, feel free to turn up at the pub and say hi.
Registration
To secure a place at the meeting you must register with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on May 18, 2012