July 2020 Meeting

The July 2020 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of July, from 6:20pm to 8:00pm (meeting starts at 6:30pm). Like last month the venue this time is wherever you happen to be because it's COMPLETELY VIRTUAL!

We'll run the meeting on our own zoom account, so make sure you have the zoom client for your preferred device, or know how to attend via the web.

Full registration details are given below, note that we will only be sending out the zoom meeting url to people who have registered, so please do make sure you do it.

Agenda

We've got one talk linked up so far for you this month. There's room for more so please get in touch if you'd like to talk about something. We also need more talks for the rest of year, so please get in touch on talks@lrug.org if there's something you'd like to say to LRUG

Improved security for password authentication

Jolyon Pawlyn:

Devise is a great authentication solution and is standard in many Rails applications. I want to look at 2 easy improvements to the default password validation. Then let's see what it takes to implement bare bones two-factor authentication using Devise and Warden.

The security features to be covered can be viewed in an example application.

Jolyon is a volunteer at Crowdfrica, ex Contentful, Wunder Mobility and Unboxed Consulting, and also an aspiring yardener.

  1. LRUG July 2020 - Jolyon Pawlyn - Improved security for password authentication

Perfect is the enemy of good

Nicky Thompson:

This talk is a rambling rag-tag collection of software engineering and problem-solving lessons learned over the course of mumble years as a developer and now an engineering manager. It includes practical tips, philosophical insights, or just advice that other people gave me that I found helpful. These ideas have helped me be better at my job over the years. They are tried and tested, things that I have actually done throughout my career. They might or might not help you.

Nicky is an Engineering Manager at FutureLearn, providing management and support to the Technology Team. Offline, Nicky enjoys watching bad TV and learning new stuff: this year it's a serious sewing/dressmaking habit.

  1. LRUG July 2020 - Nicky Thompson - Perfect is the enemy of good

…. you?

As I mentioned above, we've basically run out of offers to give talks. I can certainly vamp for ten minutes about whether or not I care about using single or double quotes for strings without any interpolation, but I think it's almost certain that some of you have some thoughts or experiences that might be more interesting.

Please get in touch on talks@lrug.org and we will take it from there.

RubyConfBY Raffle

The kind folks at RubyConfBY have given us two tickets to their conference to raffle to our attendess. The conference is going to be held (online) on the 18th & 19th of July, between 2-6PM CET (so that's 1-5PM BST). They've got a great line up of very interesting talks, and of course, it's never been easy or cheaper to attend a conference since there's no travel or hotel costs to factor in. But you can reduce that cost to zero by signing up to attend LRUG.

During the meeting, we'll run a raffle for all registered attendees and pick two. And even if you don't win in the raffle, the organisers have arranged a discount for LRUG members, which we'll share on the night.

Afterwards

Normally a few of us hang around in the Zoom chat after the meeting, but we're still on the lookout for other things we might try. If you've got a good idea of how to replicate the post-talk chats get in touch at organisers@lrug.org and we'll see what we can do.

Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct which applies to all attendees, even though there's no pub or venue. Basically they are good rules to generally live your life by.

Secure your place

Even in a virtual world there are limited places for attending the meeting so you need to register via eventbrite. The link to the zoom meeting will only be sent to registered attendees on the day of the meeting, around about 6pm. Keep an eye out for the email and check your spam just in case.

Do prepare yourself in advance by downloading the zoom client.

Posted by James Adam on Jul 01, 2020