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May 2013 Meeting

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The May 2013 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of May, 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

DCI with Ruby & Rails

Dawid Skłodowski says:

Data Context Interaction is recently invented programming paradigm, which aims at separating behaviour from data model, by extracting interactions into roles, which can be played by objects in various contexts.

This presentation is going to give brief introduction to DCI, propose ways to implement roles' injection in Ruby and discuss how DCI could be used to supplement Rails' MVC paradigm.

Come get dirty with mruby

Randy Morgan is going to lead us in an exploration of mruby:

While most of us know what mruby is, few of us have had a chance to kick the tires, poke around a bit and see what makes it tick. In this ~30 minute workshop-presentation, we will help each other to get mruby built locally, do a classic “Chunky bacon” test, and have a go at writing our own rbgems to extend the language with custom functionality.

Bring your laptop, and get your hands dirty with mruby.

Randy will be sending out instructions on pre-requisites in a few days to the mailing list. Don’t miss it!

Drinks

Also, the nice folks at Team Prime are providing some drinks during the talks, so there are even more reasons to make it along! There’ll be a range of beers and soft drinks available.

Pub

The talks usually finish up around 8pm, but that’s not the end of the meeting! We continue at The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes away. Attendance at the talks is not a requirement on coming to the pub, so if you can’t make it to them do feel free to turn up afterwards!

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?

April 2013 Meeting

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The April 2013 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of April, 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

Better security for your web applications

Najaf Ali wants to school us on security:

He’ll be covering:

How to improve the quality of your software by thinking like an attacker.

Technical walkthroughs of real-life vulnerabilities.

Practical tips for keeping your software secure over the long term.

Say hello to Padrino

Xavier Riley is going to tell us all about Padrino:

Rails showed us the power of the full-stack framework. It was good, but some of us felt the power was at the expense of lightness (and joy?).

Sinatra showed us the joy of simple. The bare essentials to start working with http requests gave us back some of the Zen of creating a codebase that did exactly what it should and nothing more. Sadly, this Zen meant reinventing wheels that Rails had already rolled.

Padrino came after both of these projects and the developers learnt from them. They re-imagined the full stack using Sinatra as a base and building from there. Sinatra++ you might think.

There’s a longer write up on the Ruby Manor 4 vestibule where Xavier originally proposed the talk.

Pub

After the talks we head over to The Slaughtered Lamb for a drink or two and the opportunity to chat. If you’re unlucky enough to be unable to make the talks, you are more than welcome at the bar.

Registration

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?

March 2013 Meeting

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The March 2013 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th 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. Registration details are given below.

Agenda

deliver

Gerhard Lazu will be showing off a new project of his called deliver:

I will be speaking about app deployment, good production practices, CI and CD and app versioning (never replace a working production app instance with a new deploy). deliver is a single utility to rule one’s deploys to gh:pages, Jekyll, Ruby, node.js etc, even legacy PHP code (we all have it). The talk will also touch on S3-backed site deploys & Route53 IP failover to that S3 site.

Passing on our skills to the next generation

Pablo Brasero Moreno says:

I will share my experience teaching programming to children for a month. I will also tell us about “code clubs” in the UK, and what technologies exist to assist teachers in this task.

Pub

We’re a friendly bunch, so if you don’t make it to the talks you can still join us for a drink afterwards. The talks normally finish up by 8pm and you can find us crowding the bar at The Slaughtered Lamb shortly after.

Also, the nice folks at House Trip are sponsoring some drinks behind the bar, so there are even more reasons to make it along!

Registration

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?

February 2013 Meeting

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The February 2013 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th of February, 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

Lightning talks!

February is our annual lightning talk evening and as usual we’re using the 20x20 format for the talks. If you’ve never encountered this format before it’s when the speaker has 20 slides that auto-transition after 20 seconds, giving them a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds in which to get their point across.

Our confirmed volunteers for 2012 are:

Yann Armand: HULK SMASH! (your db column, not your whole app)
Paul Battley: 1 + 2 = 3
Pablo Brasero Moreno: Extremist Programming
Steve Buckley: Contractor Rates & Salaries for Ruby Devs in London
Seb Jacobs: mruby
Nasir Jamal: Love your Pull Requests
Gerhard Lazu: What would Jason Bourne do?
Randy Morgan: Polyglottous emberjs with rake-pipeline and localeapp
Anurag Priyam: Afra: collectively mapping genomes

Pub

Once we finish up with the talks we head over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the evening in more informal, if admittedly slightly noisier surroundings. If you can’t make it for the talks feel free to pop along to the pub for about 8pm, which is when we usually finish up.

Also, the nice folks at Globaldev are sponsoring some drinks behind the bar, so it’s an even better idea to come along than usual.

Registration

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?

January 2013 Meeting

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The January 2013 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th 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. Registration details are given below.

Agenda

Pub quiz!

To ease us into 2013, Murray Steele will be running a pub quiz. We last did a pub quiz meeting way back in 2006 and it felt like it was about time to revisit it. Also, it provides an easy template for us to copy:

The quiz format will be as follows:

Round 1: London
Round 2: Ruby (community and history)
Round 3: Users (famous folk)
Round 4: Group (music)
Round 5: picture round (a hand out to complete during the other rounds)

Teams should have no more than 4 members. Utilising internet devices to obtain answers will be severely frowned upon. There will be extra points available for best team name.

Prizes

There will be prizes for the winning teams:

annual subscriptions to Railscasts Pro provided by
Books and ebook download vouchers provided by
$25 vouchers for Avdi Grimm’s store provided by Avdi Grimm
Download vouchers for 3 peepcode screencasts provided by

Drinks

During the pub quiz there will be a range of drinks available (soft drinks, as well as alcohol). These drinks are available thanks to sponsorship provided by:

Go Free Range
AdRoc Group
Unboxed Consulting
vzaar

Pub

When the quiz ends and the prizes have been handed out, those with an appetite to continue the pub element of the quiz will head over to The Slaughtered Lamb. If you can’t make the quiz, do feel free to turn up just to the pub later on. Our normal meetings end no later than 8pm, but the quiz may run on a bit.

Registration

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?

December 2012 Meeting

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The December 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of December, 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

Going Native

Frederick Cheung will talk to us about FFI:

We all love ruby, but sometimes ruby is not enough. Whether it be a performance bottleneck, a killer library written in C or some platform specific functionality you just have to have, sometimes you need to drop down a level.

There have been many talks that show how to take the first steps in writing a ruby C extension. This isn’t one of them. I propose instead to give an overview of different ways of extending ruby and show what each approach brings to the table. I intend to cover ‘classic’ C extensions, RubyInline and FFI across a range of ruby implementations.

My tests run faster than your tests

Joel Chippindale says his talk will be:

An introduction to Zeus and the approach it takes for making rails tests run lightning fast.

Hermes, add wings to Ruby and Javascript development

Claudio Ortolina is going to tell us about:

Hermes: A Vim/Tmux development environment to easily work with Ruby and Javascript.

Pub

Even with 3 talks to cover, we’ll still aim to finish by 8pm and head over to The Slaughtered Lamb for some drinks. If you’re unable to make it for the talks, please do turn up for the pub-bit.

Registration

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?

November 2012 Meeting

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The November 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of November, 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

An introduction to Rubymotion: Writing iOS apps with Ruby

Andrew Nesbitt says:

Rubymotion lets you write native iOS apps in Ruby, this talk explores the toolkit and the community that has sprung up around it.

Background processing in Ruby (and Rails)

Khash Sajadi says:

This is an introduction to scalable background processing in Ruby (and Rails) applications. It discusses best practises on task management, managing and scaling long running processes in apps and overviews different solutions from high end of Delayed Job to more detailed ones like Event Machine.

Pub

The talks will finish around 8pm, but that doesn’t mean you have to go home. Oh no! Us LRUG folks are a friendly lot, and so we continue the evening over at The Slaughtered Lamb which is a short walk from the Skills Matter office. Do join us there if you can’t make the formal talks.

Registration

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?

October 2012 Meeting

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The October 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of October, 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

Beautiful command-line interface design

John Leach is going to talk to us about CLI apps:

A lot of importance is placed on good GUI design but it’s easy to overlook good command line interfaces.

Taking from our experiences writing the Brightbox Cloud cli (and years of using cli tools, both good and bad), this talk will show you some of things you need to consider when designing a good cli interface (with a focus on Ruby!).

And all this without turning to ncurses!

DTrace + Ruby

Anuj Dutta has been poking about with DTrace, a performance analysis and troubleshooting tool, and wants to talk to us about it. He describes his talk as “An introduction to DTrace and it’s current state in the Ruby world”. You should care because hooks for DTrace are being added to ruby as we speak, (although they are targetting Ruby 2.0).

Pub

The formal part of the evening is usually done no later than 8pm, but that’s not when we go home. We continue the meeting in a more relaxed setting at The Slaughtered Lamb. If you can’t make the talks there are usually plenty of rubyists propping up the bar and arguing long into the evening about their preferred hash syntax, so please do come along!

Registration

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?

September 2012 Meeting

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The September 2012 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of September, 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

Doing less and keeping it simple

Ian Kynnersley describes his talk as follows:

What do we mean when we talk about simplicity? Why is it important and why is it so hard to achieve?

He wrote a little about this topic a couple of months ago on his company blog.

Objective C for Rubyists

Chris O'Sullivan is going to give us 15 minutes on Objective-C:

There are so many things we take for granted writing Ruby code – initialising hashes and arrays, doing basic arithmatic with floats and integers, using subscript accessors for containers. Trying to do these basic things in Objective C requires writing screeds of boilerplate code.

Well, it’s time to have another look at Objective C.

The latest version of the compiler includes some wonderful shortcuts to make your code more concise, readable, and a lot more like Ruby. In this talk I’ll give you a whirlwind tour of these changes.

Zero-Downtime Deployment

Jairo Diaz says:

A zero-downtime deployment configuration is important for critical systems that need to handle every request (i.e. financial system) and lately for systems following continuous delivery principles since there could be many frequent deployments . This talks present a simple configuration for zero-downtime deployments for ruby applications.

Pub

Our talks finish around 8pm, but that’s not the end of the evening. We carry on at The Slaughtered Lamb which is a short walk from the Skills Matter office. There’s usually lots of conversations going on after the talks, so if you can’t make the talks please do feel free to pop along for a drink at the pub.

Also, the nice folks at Yammer are sponsoring some drinks behind the bar again, so it’s an even better idea to come along than usual.

Registration

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?

August 2012 Meeting

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

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

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?