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March 2010 Meeting

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:51:34 GMT

The March meeting will be on Wednesday the 10th of March, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a great new space and we there won't be the problems we've had in the past with fitting people in, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.

Agenda

Software Craftsmanship

This month Chris Parsons and Corey Haines will be leading us in an evening of exploration of the ideas behind Software Craftsmanship.

Where the agile movement focused on principles for developing better software, the software craftsmanship movement focuses on developing better software developers, growing out of a frustration with the current state of the software development industries. Starting with Uncle Bob's keynote about 'craft over crap', many companies and individuals started looking at concrete ways to advance our field into a true profession; the focus generally resting on two key areas: ways to effectively acquire new practices and ways to bring new people into our field.Chris and Corey will be presenting their thoughts on how this affects businesses and personal careers.

With the emphasis on developer improvement, might we lose the focus on delivering business value? Chris will talk about how craftsmanship ideas have been applied at Eden, showing there doesn't have to be a conflict between these two goals.

The terms 'apprentice' and 'journeyman' are often thrown around without really defining what they mean in terms of acquiring skills and techniques. Corey will discuss these words, describing concrete definitions that go past the FUD often associated with them (nobody is asking you to doff your cap or mop the floors with a toothbrush).

We will then hold a Q&A session and answer people's questions and comments. If there's time, Corey will discuss and perform a code kata, one helpful way to practice our techniques.

Videos of Chris's talk (slides) and Corey's talk (slides) are available on the Skills Matter site.

"Analogue Blog"

After the hiatus in February, the analogue blog will return at the start of this meeting. There'll be about 10-15 minutes available for anyone to get up and say something to the group. It's a open forum for the local community to speak to each other, maybe to announce a newly released gem or library, maybe to ask the rest of the group for some help, or to suggest a theme for a future meeting. The only rule is that you shouldn't go on for too long as there are other people that want to say something too.

Pub

After the meeting we head on over to The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes walk from the Skills Matter eXchange. If you can't make it to the meeting, we usually finish up at about 8pm if you want to head along for just the pub bit.

Registration

Skills Matter still prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are planning to come. It's not a disaster if you don't, as there's plenty of space, but it is polite to let them know you are coming so they can set the room up appropriately. You'll also get a name badge, so you really should register.

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

February 2010 Meeting

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:22:33 GMT

The February meeting will be on Wednesday the 10th of February, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a great new space and we there won't be the problems we've had in the past with fitting people in, but you should still register early to let Skills Matter know you are coming.

Agenda

Lightning talks!

This month we're having our annual lightning talk evening. If you've not been to one of these before it's quite simple; we have lots of short talks all on one night. We use the 20x20 format for our talks which means that each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-transition after 20 seconds, this gives them 6 minutes 40 seconds to get their point across. It's a really fun way to run a lightning talk event, and the rigid time constraints mean that the talks tend to be really entertaining (jettisoning for brevity things like explanations or support for the speakers opinions).

The current line-up of 20x20-ers is as follows:

Paul Ardeleanu - Paul will talk to us about Rails & iPhone integration. (Video)
Ismael Celis - Using Websockets with EventMachine. (Video)
Joel Chippindale - Joel will talk about Show Off; ruby-based HTML presentation software (this talk might get a bit meta). (Video)
Lars Jorgensen - Evolution of data models in Rails. Lessons learned. (Video)
Alex MacCaw - Bowline - Alex has been building a ruby GUI framework and wants to show it off. (Video)
Anup Narkhede - birdpie.com - Anup will introduce the site and the architecture behind it; Rails 3.0, Redis, and Resque. (Video)
Thomas Pomfret - Rack::Cache and associated things. (Video)
Brent Snook - Decorating the domain - Wrapping polymorphic presentation logic around the model. (Video)
Murray Steele - The mailing list suggested that Murray talk about Fibers in Ruby 1.9. (Video)

"Analogue Blog"

Depending on how many lighning talks there are, we may have time at the start of the meeting for 10-15 minutes of free time for anyone to speak. You don't need to ask for permission or let us know in advance that you have something to say here, just turn up, stand up and say it! It's a forum for announcements, or pleas for help, or a soapbox for starting discussions. Just remember not to run on for too long as there's probably other people that want to say something too (it would also be embarrassing if you ran on for longer than our scheduled lightning talks!).

Pub

The meeting will finish around 8pm and we'll be in a local pub shortly thereafter. The pub we tried after the last meeting was The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes walk from Skills Matter's new office. If you can't make it for the main meeting consider, coming along as an advance guard to the pub and securing us some tables.

Registration

Registration isn't mandatory as Skills Matter's new office has plenty of space. That said, you really should register as it lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly and means you'll get a name badge so people know who you are. If there aren't enough seats, people without name badges will have to sit on the floor. Please do register.

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

January 2010 Meeting

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:51:30 GMT

The first meeting of LRUG in 2010 will be on Wednesday the 13th of January, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their new offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a bright new space and we shouldn't have any problems with fitting people in, but you should still register your attendance early to let Skills Matter know you are coming.

Agenda

Symbol vs. String

~~Julian Burgess fresh from his special guest hosting of the December meeting is going to step once more into the spotlight, but this time he's going to give us a talk:~~

When I first started down the road of learning Ruby I had no idea what a symbol was. Gradually I've learnt to the point that I believe I can identify cases where using a symbol will be a good idea (saving memory and speed) and cases where it would be a bad idea (eating up all your memory).

The talk would be pretty short, I might say something which is completely wrong so will rely on the crowd to correct me. The goal being at the end for everyone in the room to understand and love the symbol.

~~Note: Description borrowed from his Ruby Manor proposal. You can check the thread to see what other things people asked for that he might cover.~~

Julian couldn't make it because of inclement weather. However, we had a replacement in the shape of:

Dragonfly

Mark Evans gave us an overview of a new file attachment gem he'd written called Dragonfly. The interesting thing about this gem is that rather than specifying the thumbnail sizes at the model level, you specify them at the point at which you want to use them in the view and leave it up to caching to deal with performance.

Thanks to Mark for stepping in at the last minute!

A video of Mark's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

An update on Redcar

Daniel Lucraft is going to talk to us about Redcar, the Ruby IDE he's been writing. Daniel first talked to us about it in March last year and he wants to give us an update on how it's been going since then. He recently released 0.3 and is looking for interested rubyists to play start hacking on it.

A video of Daniel's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

"Analogue Blog"

We'll start the meeting with 10-15 minutes of free time for anyone to speak. You don't need to ask for permission or let us know in advance that you have something to say here, just turn up, stand up and say it! It's a forum for announcements, or pleas for help, or a soapbox for starting discussions. Just remember not to run on for too long as there's probably other people that want to say something too.

Pub

We aim to finish up the meeting by 8pm, after which we mosey on down to ... well ... we're not sure. Skills Matter's new office isn't close to our old preferred pub, so we're going to have to find a new one. We've organised a special LRUG Nights to do just that. Watch this space to find out what pub we choose (or come along on the 6th to help us choose!). Regardless of what pub we choose, if for any reason you can't make the talks it's fine to come along just for the pub part of the meeting.

Registration

Registration isn't mandatory as Skills Matter's new office has plenty of space. However, registration lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly and if you don't register you might have to sit on the floor. It's also polite to let people know if you're coming. So, please do register.

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

December 2009 Meeting

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:22:28 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 9th of December, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, at our new venue The Crypt (it's very close to our previous venues). Despite the new venue it's still important for people to register so Skills Matter know how many people to expect and set the room up correctly.

Agenda

DDD (Domain Driven Design)

Alex Young is going to talk about DDD. Chances are his talk will be based on a comment he made on the mailing list:

I also think that of the major Ruby ORM libraries, only Sequel is really aligned with DDD in the first place, so if you're using anything else you've already compromised the model (although again, possibly that's a discussion for another time).

A video of Alex's talk can be found on the Skills Matter site.

Javascript Stories: The Animal, Mineral or Vegetable guide to testing javascript in web applications.

Rob Holland describes his talk as follows:

The talk will cover how to use capybara with cucumber to easily write and run stories including javascript functionality. The talk should be useful to people who don't currently test their javascript, or those who are already doing so with another framework.

A video of Rob's talk can be found on the Skills Matter site.

"Analogue Blog"

At the start of each meeting we have 10-15 minutes set aside for anyone in the room to speak. It's run "open" style, so you don't need to ask for permission, just stand up and say something. In the past we've had new site announcements, gem demos, new framework announcements, overviews of recent conferences; basically anything you might post a link to on something like Ruby Flow, you should think about mentioning here.

Pub

We aim to finish up the meeting by 8pm, after which we mosey on down to The Crown Tavern to continue the evening. If for any reason you can't make the talks feel free to come along to the pub and mix with your fellow rubyists. In fact, if you get there early, you can get the first drinks in!

Registration

Registration isn't mandatory as there's always room in the venue on the night, however, registration lets Skills Matter arrange the room properly so if you don't register you might have to sit on the floor. So, please do register.

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

November 2009 Meeting

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:59:57 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 11th of November, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, at our new venue The Crypt (it's very close to our previous venues). Despite the new venue it's still important for people to register so Skills Matter know how many people to expect and set the room up correctly.

Agenda

We're hoping for a "Ruby in Sys Admin" theme this month.

John Arundel: Is Your Sysadmin Dumber Than a Hamster? How to automate your sysadmin out of a job, and into a more interesting job.

John offered to do a talk about Puppet and Chef covering some or more of the following topics:

Why aren't sysadmins as smart as developers?
How do you build 100 servers in a day?
How to automate the dumb stuff
Why it's quicker to do things more slowly
How to convince your boss you need an automated infrastructure
Why automation gives you staging and continuous integration for free

A video of John's talk is available on the Skills Matter site and his slides can be found on Slideshare.

Julian Simpson: Drunken Build Monkey

Julian Simpson has seen things. Scary things. In a career that has spanned 15 years of Unix systems administration with detours into continuous integration and build management, he's seen quite a lot. By day he works in a Ruby on Rails development team in London. By night he blogs about CI as The Build Doctor. In this talk he's going to discuss testing infrastructure before you deploy it, more Puppet, declarative systems, CI, and top tips for developers who want to get code into production and still have time to go to the pub afterwards.

A video of Julian's talk is available on the Skills Matter site and his slides can be found on Slideshare.

"Analogue Blog"

At the start of each meeting we have 10-15 minutes set aside for people to speak about anything they think is of interest to the group. It's "open" style, so you don't need to ask for permission, just turn up and say something. In the past we've had overviews of recent conferences, discussions of alternative JS frameworks for Rails, announcements about new events, calls for help reviewing patches for Rails, a quick demo of a new gem. Basically anything you might post a link to on something like Ruby Flow, you should think about mentioning here.

Pub

At the end of the meeting we like to head over to The Crown Tavern for a spot of socialising over a beer or two. We're usually at the pub from about 8:00pm ish so if you don't think you can make the "proper" meeting feel free to come along just for the pub. It's fine to turn up to the meeting late though, you don't have to be there at 6:30 to get in!

Registration

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

October 2009 Meeting

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:35:50 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 14th of October, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, at our new venue The Crypt (it's very close to our previous venues). We still need people to register though to make sure the room is set up properly.

Agenda

Brent Snook: A trio of gems

Brent offered to talk about one or more of the following three gems he's been working on:

baldrick - used for gluing stuff together; can be used to monitor RSS among other things
numerouno - English natural language parser for numbers ('seventy seven'.as_number == 77)
bumps - used to pull in Cucumber features from another source and also push the results of a run

There was most interest in bumps but if you get on our mailing list you can let him know which you'd rather hear more about.

A video of Brent's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Tom Stuart : Enumerators

During our last meeting, Tom was surprised by how many people (both Ruby newbies and "Rails not Ruby" programmers) were asking questions about Enumerable, e.g. what map/inject/zip etc do. Tom has massive functional chops and is going to give a talk that starts with this and then expands into a rant about programming in a functional style.

A video of Tom's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Others

We still have room for one more speakers, or we can let Tom and Brent talk for longer. Let us know if you're interested.

"Analogue Blog"

We missed out on this during the Dojo meeting last month because of time constraints. We'll make sure there's time this month though. The idea is that we have 10-15 minutes at the start of the meeting for anyone to say whatever they think is interesting; you could announce a gem you've written, you could point out a nice plugin or tool that you've been using recently, you can mention a blog post that got you thinking, you could ask for some help on a pet-project, basically anything goes, just keep it short so that everyone else has time to speak!

Pub

Registration

Our new venue doesn't have any capacity problems, so registration isn't mandatory. That said, it's really helpful if you do register with Skills Matter if you are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter layout the room properly and make sure everyone has a name badge to help with socialising later.

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

September 2009 Meeting

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:56:02 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 9th of September, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, at our new venue The Crypt (it's very close to the other venues). We still need people to register though to make sure the room is set up properly.

Agenda

Coding Dojo

For this meeting we'll be running a Coding Dojo. You can find out much more detail on these at the Coding Dojo wiki, but the basic idea is as follows:

The Dojo starts with the definition of a problem to be worked on. It'll be something relatively simple, but with enough scope for plenty of interesting choices to be made about the design. We'll have one laptop connected to a projector and two developers will pair on it to iterate towards a solution. Every so often, the "driving" developer (the one at the keyboard) will sit down, the other developer will become the "driver" and another member of the group will step up to complete the pair. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For our Dojo, because the group is so large, we plan to split the attendees on the night into 2 or 3 groups to work on the problem and will time the "every so often" such that everyone should get a turn at the laptop. To help speed up the splitting into groups on the night you should add your name to a team on our spreadsheet. To frame the Dojo-ing we'll introduce the concept of Dojo's at the start of the evening in a bit more detail, as well as describe the problem to be worked on, and then at the end of the meeting, we'll go round each group and let them say how they found the experience and describe their solution. There'll also be one or two people floating around not participating, but making sure that the Dojo is running smoothly and giving advice to groups struggling.

Hopefully everyone gets a turn at the laptop and so everyone will write some code on the night. We hope it'll be a good way of letting inexperienced developers see how more experience developers approach problems and hopefully learn a lot by watching and working with them. Of course, those experienced developers will also get a chance to be pulled up on things and forced to think outside of their, perhaps, fixed mindsets.

There are still some details to be thrashed out, like what the problem will be, and how to split the meeting up into groups to ensure a even spread of ability in each group (see the spreadsheet). We'll discuss all that on the mailing list, so do sign up and follow along.

The idea for this meeting wouldn't have been possible without help from Matt Wynne and Ivan Sanchez, who have both run Dojo's in the past and will be helping out on the mailing list and on the evening itself.

The code produced by each of the 3 groups is available on the LRUG github account:

There is also a video of the evening available on the Skills Matter site.

"Analogue Blog"

Following on from last month there'll be 10-15 minutes at the start of the meeting for the analogue blog. The Analogue Blog is open for anyone to say whatever they think is interesting; you could announce a gem you've written, you could point out a nice plugin or tool that you've been using recently, you can mention a blog post that got you thinking, you could ask for some help on a pet-project, basically anything goes, just keep it short so that everyone else has time to speak!

Pub

This meeting is going to be very different to our normal presentation-based meetings, and as such is bound to generate a lot to talk about. No-one likes to talk with a dry throat so, as usual, we'll head on over to The Crown Tavern for some sweet throat lubrication. Although we start the formal meeting proceedings at 6:30, and are open to late-comers, there are plenty of LRUG regulars who can't quite make it. If you're one of those feel free to head on over to pub for about 8pm, which is when we aim to finish up the Dojo.

Registration

Our new venue shouldn't have any capacity problems. However, we'd still like for people to register with Skills Matter if they are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter layout the room properly and make sure everyone has a name badge. For this event it'll also help us know how many groups to split up into, so please do register as early as you can to help us out.

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

Also, there's a spreadsheet of teams you should add your name to if you are coming. This'll speed up the splitting into groups when we start the Dojo, and it'll also hopefully mean that each group has an even spread of abilities in it. Go add your name!.

August 2009 Meeting

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:33:44 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 12th of August, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, at our new venue The Crypt (it's very close to the other venues). We still need people to register though to make sure the room is set up properly.

Agenda

Making your rails app kick ass with ruby-prof and kcachegrind

Taryn East wants to talk to us about profiling.

I've used the ruby-prof and kcachegrind tools a few times to profile some of the rails projects I've worked on. They're powerful tools that can let you dig down into the bowels of your code and find the real trouble-makers, but they require a bit of familiarity as they really are a bit of information-overload. So I thought I could give a talk on how to set them up - where/how to use them and what they can do for you.

A video of Taryn's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

AMQP in Ruby

Alex Graul is going to talk about AMQP messaging with ruby.

AMQP is a powerful, flexible and completely open messaging standard. Capable of scaling to millions of messages a second with incredibly low latency, AMQP is an fantastic backbone on which to build service architectures. In this talk I'll give you an overview of the AMQP standard, an introduction to synchronous and asynchronous libraries for working with AMQP in Ruby and some examples uses.

If he's finished writing it, Gerhard Lazu will do a demo of a app for buffering ICY streams using AMQP.

A video of Alex's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

~~Heroku (maybe)~~

Morten Bagai from Heroku might be in town and if so is going to give us an overview of their platform. His presentation will also cover where they're going in the near future, what they'd like to know from us and info on their plans for their European customers.

Morten couldn't make it, but hopes to be able to offer us this talk at some point in the future.

"Analogue Blog"

~~Stealing~~Borrowing an idea from the Sydney Ruby User Group we'll put aside some time at the start of the meeting where you can pass on information you think is of interest to the group. For example you could announce a new gem you've written or found useful recently, let people know about any interesting events that are happening soon or just bring people's attention to news or gossip within the greater ruby community. If you'd think about blogging it or starring it in your RSS reader, then mention it here. This section will last for about 10-15 minutes and anyone can speak if they keep it short and to the point!

Pub

At the end of the formal part of the meeting we change into our smoking jackets and retire to the quiet backrooms of a local tavern for a snifter of brandy, a fine snub of tobacco for our pipes and try to outdo each other with increasingly outrageous anecdotes. The Crown Tavern is just down the street from the venue for the talks and is ideally located for this after-hours debating session. Those of us unable to make the main meeting should aim to arrive at The Crown Tavern at about 8pm if they want to join in the debate.

Registration

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

July 2009 Meeting

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:59:44 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 8th of July, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, this time at a new venue The Crypt (it's very close to the other venues). We still need people to register though to make sure the room is set up properly.

Agenda

Do Mix Your Drinks

Tom Stuart will be talking about how abstract algebra is useful for Ruby programmers, both when writing everyday programs and when going to the pub afterwards. As an example he'll show how to use his VectorSpace library to compare and manipulate structured data for free.

A video of Tom's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Ruby+Arduino

Tomasz Wegrzanowski will be giving a talk that he describes as follows:

Arduino is an inexpensive Open Source physical computing platform which makes building interactive gadgets of your design much easier on the hardware side. Now let's add some Ruby so programming those gadgets becomes easy too...

A video of Tomasz's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Pub

After the meeting it's usual to continue the meeting in a more informal style at The Crown Tavern. This pub is just down the street from our new venue, in fact you'd have to walk past it on the way to the tube station, so it's hard to avoid. Speaking of avoiding things, if you can't make the main meeting, we aim to be in the pub from about 8pm and you're more than welcome to come along and help us prop up the bar.

Registration

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

June 2009 Meeting

Tue, 19 May 2009 01:39:32 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of June, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at either their offices or one of their overflow venues. The venue we get is dependent on how many people register and the availability of sponsorship to pay for a larger room. Do your bit by registering early.

Agenda

RDF in Rails

Patrick Sinclair will be talking about publishing RDF from Rails and getting the community to participate in Linked Data.

A video of Patrick's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

DSL Or A Code Smell...

Abdel A. Saleh recently ran a code review of a DSL he was writing at work. He's going to let us know what he learned from that experience:

DSLs are very powerful tools but are they always necessary? This is a tale in code about my work on a small 'Request Throttling' library where I thought I needed a DSL but it turned out I was sorely mistaken. I'll highlight some common DSLing techniques and the decisions that steered me away from them.

A video of Abdel's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

2 Apps, 1 Test : Distributed Ruby Unit Testing

Tom Lea has a distributed testing framework called Drunit that he's going to tell us about. Drunit (from the Readme) is:

A library for running tests across multiple applications from a single test case.

and, crucially:

Over 14% more awesome than a bag of chips.

A video of Tom's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Pub

At the end of all this we like to drop our polite facade and scramble to be first at the bar and woe betide anyone that gets in our way. The pub we head to is The Crown Tavern, which is conveniently located close to all of the venues that Skills Matter provide. If the main meeting doesn't fit with your hectic schedule surely you can fit in a pint on the way home? We aim to finish up the talks at 8pm, so come to the pub for then and chat with your local ruby community.

Registration

We need people to register with Skills Matter if they are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter know how many people to expect to turn up and plan the venue accordingly. If enough people register we need to book a larger venue, but that can take some time so Skills Matter need some notice to do so. So please register as early as you can. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don't want that!

There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.