August 2012 Meeting
The August 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of August, 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
Cut and Polish: Crafting Gems
Pat Allan is going to tell us all about writing rubygems:
Gems underpin almost every piece of Ruby code we write – and so, being able to write your own gems is not only incredibly useful, it provides an avenue for code reuse and open source sharing. I'll be talking about the ecosystem around gems and the fundamentals for writing your own gem from the ground up, plus some of the tools available to assist with this, along with ideal approaches and best practices for gem development.
Nil points: a talk about nothing, NULL, undefined, Maybe, and other ghosts in Ruby and beyond
David Nolan has an idea about nil:
nil in Ruby is neat, simple, and convenient. But it's also problematic. It infiltrates our code, silently, until boom! 'undefined method foo for nil:NilClass' (or - true story, there's no time to explain - suddenly thousands of Mark Zuckerbergs).
In this talk, I take a deep dive into nil, NULL, undefined, Maybe and other ghosts in Ruby and beyond. I want uncover important concepts that I think are obscured by by nil's convenience. And I think nil can be so corrosive it's worth asking why we need it at all. Can we eliminate it completely? Can it be improved?
Sure, there are decent Ruby patterns and practices for living with nil, and I'll take a look at them. But I'll also try to illuminate nil by way of a vintage Soviet computer, Jainism, a billion dollars, a Peruvian tribe, and a Victorian wooden adding machine. And, since this is Ruby, there will some reckless live monkey-patching.
Pub
We have to be out of the venue by 8pm, but we don't stop the meeting then. We make the short walk to The Slaughtered Lamb and continue in more informal surroundings there. It's a large pub so if you can't make the first part of the meeting there'll be more than enough room for you at this second part.
Also, the nice folks at Yammer are sponsoring some drinks behind the bar, so it's an even better idea to come along than usual.
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 Jul 19, 2012