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May 2008 Meeting

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:02:38 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St.. However, depending on numbers (see the note about registration below) we might move to a larger venue.

Agenda

Settling New Caprica: getting your pet project off the ground.

Tom Armitage launched a rails forum site called New Caprica back in March after ~9 months of toil. In his own words:

On the way it's had two rewrites, I've taught myself Test:Unit, RSpec, Capistrano, and a few other things through it, and it currently has about 74% C0 coverage and a 2:1 Test:Code ratio.

I'm also pretty exhausted, and now have the joy of wrangling real users.

Anyhow, I thought there could be something fun in lessons learned, a few bits of advice I realised on the way, and perhaps a small demo of the software.

Monkeyweaving: Live Native Monkeypatching

Tim Becker popped up on our mailing list to offer up a talk about a new meta-programming library called weave that he'd been developing. In his own words:

weave is a library for 'live native monkey patching'. It provides a native wrapper to the C functions in the MRI Ruby implementation that are involved in creating native extensions. This allows you to swap native code in and out at runtime.

Pub

It's LRUG tradition to follow up the formal part of the night with a drink or two at The Crown Tavern. It's an excellent opportunity to find out what the rest of the ruby community is up to, and find people to help you out with your own pet projects. If you don't think you'll make it for the talks we're usually in the pub from about 8:00pm, so come along and don't miss out on the fun.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows SKills Matter to organise a larger room if we need it. For the past couple of meetings we've used the overflow venue, but prior to that we've had to close registration and turn people away. The larger room, close to the usual venue, needs about a weeks notice for Skills Matter to book it. Please, therefore, register now rather than 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.

April 2008 Meeting

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:23:09 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of April, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, in ~~our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St.~~ the Skills Matter overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. However, depending on numbers (see the note about registration below) we might move to a larger venue.

Agenda

A video of the meeting, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google video (or the Skills Matter site).

Show'n'Tell

Lots of people have probably written code (be it gems, rails plugins, collections of rake tasks or little itch-scratcher scripts) that they're kinda proud of, but don't really want to pad out a 5-10 minute demo / show-off into one of our "traditional" 20-30 minute talks, so we never get to hear about it. As a community we're probably missing out on a lot of sweet ruby goodness because of that.

This month we hope to change that by running a bunch of Show'n'Tell sessions where people show off their code for 5-10 mins. There's no set idea on what you should show off: perhaps a neat function you're really proud of, perhaps a whole gem, perhaps just some .irbrc hacks that you think are super useful. Anything goes, as long as it's code.

Some people that have volunteered so far:

James Adam - soup and vanilla
Daniel Lucraft - rak
Alex MacCaw - juggernaut
Rob McKinnon - morph (slides)
Sean O'Halpin - doodle
Dan Webb - "Fiddling with god" (perhaps with a starling)

There's plenty of room for more stuff, so get in touch to volunteer something.

Pub

Exhausted and weary from all the code being thrown around we'll stumble into The Crown Tavern to try to make sense of it all. Here's where we'll hatch master plans to combine all the gems, rake tasks and scripts into a new framework for world domination. If you're not sure that you'll make it for the main meeting, but don't want to be left out of the LRUG master-plan you should definitely come along to the pub and sign up for a minor bureaucratic position in the New World Order.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration has pretty much become mandatory over the past few months to help Skills Matter with managing the rooms. Last month registrations happened early enough that Skills Matter were able to book a larger venue, however prior to that registrations haven't been timely enough and we've had to close registration and turn people away at the doors. The larger room, close to the usual venue, needs about a weeks notice for Skills Matter to book it. Please, therefore, register now rather than 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.

March 2008 Meeting

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:16:14 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of March, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, in ~~our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St.~~ the Skills Matter overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. (See note about registration below.)

Agenda

It's entering silly season in the ruby conference year, with 9 conferences due in March and April (according to this calendar). All the speakers at this meeting are talking at one or more of these conferences.

Challenges in making Ruby run effectively on a JVM

Kresten Krab Thorup, track host and speaker at both QCon and RubyFools, will provide an overview of the issues, trade-offs and challenges in making dynamic object-oriented languages run effectively; both in general, and specifically making Ruby run well on the JVM. Kresten has many years deep knowledge of getting the most out of a JVM, and has recently been working on an research project on building yet another JVM-based virtual machine for Ruby and thus, the talk is organized around issues and findings in building this virtual machine.

A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.

mobileAct: a high-risk Rails app for Channel 4

Thomas Pomfret is going to give us a trailer version of his Scotland On Rails talk. The blurb from the conference website says:

mobileAct Unsigned is Channel 4 TV search for the best unsigned band in Britain. The site lets bands and fans to communicate and share media. In addition, users get to vote on who should win the million pound recording deal. "mobileAct: a high-risk Rails app for Channel 4" will report back on Mint's experiences building this mass-market application. In the light of recent TV voting scandals, the spotlight was on voting. In a very public arena, we had to make sure not only that the vote was fair, but that it could be seen to be fair.

So we can expect his "trailer" to cover some or all of that.

A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.

Handling Long-Running Tasks in Rails

Andrew Stewart is also talking at Scotland On Rails and so as not to be shown up by Thomas's extra preparation is also going to give us a trailer for his talk, described on the conference site as follows:

Rails is a web framework and thus designed for HTTP's synchronous request and response: you make a request to the application, the application executes it and returns the response. For your application to feel snappy its filters and actions should take no more than a few milliseconds to execute. But what do you do if you need to run a task that takes more than a few milliseconds? Perhaps ten minutes or even longer? You need to move execution off the request-response thread and onto a different one.

Rails doesn't support this out of the box and it's not obvious how to do this correctly. Happily a number of plugins fill the gap. They all work differently, though, and cater for different situations. The one you need for your application depends on your situation.

This session lays out all your options and explains where each plugin is best suited. It shows you how to work with each plugin. By the end you will be able to make an informed decision about which one you need in any given situation - and how to use it well.

We obviously can't expect a "trailer" to cover all the plugins and solutions out there, but it's bound to cover some of them.

A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.

Pub

As usual, we'll head down to The Crown Tavern after the "serious" meeting. There's usually lots of good ruby chat in the pub and it's a great opportunity to try and thrash out those thorny problems with work or personal projects. If you're not sure that you'll make it for the main meeting, you should definitely come along to the pub and meet up with us there.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration has pretty much become mandatory, as in the past few meetings we've had to close the doors after an influx of registrants over the final weekend, resulting in standing room only. Skills Matter can book a larger room, but they need much more notice in order to do so. Please, therefore, register now rather than 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.

February 2008 Meeting

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 02:11:52 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th of February, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, and we'll be returning to our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

Lightning Talks

This month, we're going to have a series of lightning talks from various members of the local ruby community. To make it even more interesting, all the presentations will follow the 20x20 slide format (also known as Pecha Kucha). The presenter has 20 slides which are displayed for 20 seconds each, giving a total presentation time of 6:40. It should be a fun evening, as with only 6:40 in which to get your point across the presenters will have to be economical with their words, and possibly leave out things like justification or proof for their opinions.

We're aiming to have between 8 and 10 presenters. Those already confirmed are:

James Adam - "Rails is not the only fruit"
Richard Livsey - RSpec stories.
Rob McKinnon - "A Ruby Journey"
Daniel Tenner - Adobe Flex: what it is, why he uses it with ruby
Dafydd Rees - "When shouldn't you use a DSL? and what can you do instead?"
David Salgado - Rails deployment platforms
Roland Swingler - Pattern matching in ruby
Laurie Young - Design patterns in ruby

A video of the meeting, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or on the Skills Matter site.

QCon Ticket Raffle

The kind folk organising the QCon conference have given us a ticket to raffle off. Of immediate interest to us would be the track on ruby, but the rest of the conference seems interesting as well, with topics of interest such as agile development, new languages and domain specific languages to name just a couple of the other tracks on offer. To give away the ticket we'll do the same thing as we've done on past occasions and choose the lucky recipient from the names of the attendees on the night.

Pub

Once the excitement of the slides and ticket raffle have died down, we'll head on over to The Crown Tavern. This pub is only a couple of minutes walk from the Skills Matter offices and so is perfect for a post-meeting chat and drink. As usual, if you're not sure that you'll make it in time for the main meeting, you are more than welcome to just head along to the pub and meet up with us there.

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. They need us to register so they make sure we get the most appropriately sized room, but they can only accommodate a larger than usual meeting (more than 80 folk) if they get enough notice to book a bigger room, so register now rather than later. There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring.

January 2008 Emergency Backup Meeting

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:26:08 GMT

Due to organisational problems, the proposed January Pub Quiz (we're trying to start a tradition) has been postponed until a later date. It'll probably be run in March as a special LRUG Nights.

In the interim the January emergency backup meeting is on Monday the 14th of January, from 6:30pm onwards at The Chandos pub in central London. There's no agenda, other than to mull over the recent events, new releases and gossip from the ruby community over the festive break.

See you all there.

December 2007 Meeting

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 04:27:03 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of December, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

Rails CMS Roundup

Thomas R Koll has been looking at Rails CMS solutions recently. He's going to present to us a quick review of the current crop of players: Radiant CMS, Mephisto, Goldberg and possibly others. The rest of his talk will focus on how easy it is to integrate existing sites / code into these CMS solutions based on 2 example websites that he'll integrate the CMS's into during the talk.

Slides and extra content are available here.

Ruby 1.9

Ruby 1.9 is scheduled for release around Christmas 2007 and Murray Steele decided to take a look at the development version to see what was new and exciting with this latest version of the language we all know and love. Murray's talk will draw on his findings and explain to us some of these new features and also cover the changes between ruby 1.8 and ruby 1.9.

Slides are available here.

Pub

The Crown Tavern is only a hop, skip and jump away from the Skills Matter offices and we congregate here after the talks for a drink and a chat. If you don't think you can make it for the 6:30 kick-off of the main presentation part of the evening, just come along to the pub for the socialising.

Registration

November 2007 Meeting

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:40:23 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of November, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

Building a UI framework on top of Rails

Matthew Wilson has been working on an application that has delved further and further into true 'web application' territory, and away (to some extent) from the standard RESTful one-page-per-resource object-graph-browsing application structure favoured by DHH. In order to achieve this he decided that what was needed was a widget-based UI framework that sat atop Rails. As well as showing off the resulting framework, Matthew's talk is going to focus on the experience he had in building an architecture on top of Rails.

Matt has posted some more info about his talk over at the playlouder development blog, and the slides are available from the same place.

Scripting OS X with Ruby

Matt Patterson is going to give us a whistle-stop tour of Apple's Open Scripting Architecture, which is normally hooked into through Applescript. He's then going to tell us how to get to it through Ruby and why we should care. In a final flourish, the talk will be topped off with a practical sample application munging entries in the system address book right before our very eyes.

Slides are available here.

Pub

Once the last question has been asked of our weary speakers we head to The Crown Tavern, a charming little pub located just moments from the Skills Matter office. We're a friendly bunch, so if you don't think you can make it for the talk-based part of the meeting then just pop along to the pub and say "Hi".

Registration

As usual, please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. This way they can manage seating and make sure we get the most appropriately sized room. There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring.

October 2007 Meeting

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:14:07 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of October, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

resouces_controller

Ian White has developed a rails plugin called resources_controller which he's going to show off to us. It answers the problems that many rails developers have noticed with the new RESTful approach; RESTful controllers are mostly boiler-plate code - repeated over and over.

More about the plugin can be found on Ian's blog and the slides are available at the same place.

Netbeans - The open source Ruby IDE written in coughJavacough

DJ Walker-Morgan was lined up to do a demo of Netbeans as a ruby development platform at the LRUG BoF session at the No Fluff Just Stuff Exchange. Unfortunately, timing constraints meant he didn't get to give it so we've invited him to run it at this month's LRUG meeting instead.

His talk will be heavily demo-based, so he can show off the features that Netbeans provides to the ruby developer. He'll be covering the latest release 6.0 Beta 1 which has a boat-load of new ruby/jruby/rails support.

Slides are available here.

Pub

Post-talks The Crown Tavern, conveniently located just round the corner from the Skills Matter offices, becomes our home for the rest of the evening. There's usually a lot of good discussions here, so if you don't think you can make it for the presentations then just come along to the pub, you're more than welcome.

Registration

September 2007 Meeting

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:12:11 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of September, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

StaticMatic

Stephen Bartholomew was going to give a talk last month but kindly stepped aside to let Jay Phillips, who was only in the country for a few weeks, do a talk. This month however, there'll be no such chivalry and Stephen is determined to talk to us about his gem StaticMatic and the technologies that it uses.

StaticMatic is a gem for building static websites and it uses the love it or hate it alternate templating language Haml & Sass. The gem is perfect for... well, as Stephen says:

CMS is overrated. A lot of the time, clients want us to do what we do best - well designed pages with structured, accessible and maintainable markup & styling.

CMSs are often sufficient for this, but sometimes they can be restrictive and more cumbersome than just working with good ol' source code. At the same time we want our code to be structured, DRY and flexible.

Slides are available here.

Hpricot, Merb, Net::TOC

Tom Armitage hates crappy websites, more so when he actually wants access to the content they provide. In an effort to save his sanity he's been playing about with some ruby libraries, and he's going to tell us all about it in a talk he's titled "Turning the web on its head: Screen-scraping with Hpricot, DIY-API, and conversational interfaces". He's going to cover:

a quick introduction to Hpricot
a quicker introduction to Merb
a look at the Net::TOC library

Pub

After all this we move on from the Skills Matter office to The Crown Tavern just round the corner. Here we sup from the selection of fine beers and wines on offer and continue the discussions. If you can't make it to the presentations then feel free to come along just for this bit.

Registration

As usual, please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come, so they can manage seating and making sure we get the most appropriately sized room. There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring.

August 2007 Meeting

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:00:13 GMT

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of August, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St..

Agenda

No theme this month unfortunately, unless you count random Ruby goodness as a theme. No? Ah well, I'll try better for next time.

Ruby2Ruby

Our main speaker for this meeting is Frederik Fix, who has been delving into the dark work of ruby2ruby and ParseTree. This stuff is, in Frederiks own words:

quite advanced and very experimental. But that makes it all the more interesting.

To prove it, he proposes a talk with the following structure:

Intro to Abstract Syntax Tree
How to get it from ParseTree
Examples of how to use the AST
Demo of a plugin that using all this to translate Ruby to JavaScript

Now, that does sound interesting, doesn't it?

Adhearsion

Jay Phillips fresh (or massively jet-lagged) from Ruby Hoedown is going to talk to us about Adhearsion. The talk he'll give will be a distilled version of his Hoedown talk, titled Next-Gen VoIP Development with Ruby and Adhearsion. The gist from the Hoedown site is:

Adhearsion's creator Jay Phillips will discuss Ruby's work in VoIP and how even complete telephony novices can powerfully develop their own VoIP system with Asterisk and Adhearsion using pure-Ruby for all application logic. Attendees will see Jay develop a sophisticated Adhearsion application that integrates and handles calls from the public telephone network and integrates with a Rails application. Adding a voice component to a web application is much easier than you think!

StaticMatic

Stephen Bartholomew's talk about StaticMatic has been postponed until next month to make space for our Jay's talk, as Jay is only over for one meeting.

Pub

The Crown Tavern just round the corner from the Skills Matter office is where we'll retire to don smoking jackets, grab our pipes and recline in high backed leather armchairs making extravagant wagers about circumnavigating the globe. If that sounds like your kind of thing, but you can't make the presentations, come along just for this bit.