August 2020 Meeting

The August 2020 (What? Already?!) meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of August, 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 two talks this month. 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

Language doesn't matter: what makes a senior engineer?

Matt Bee:

What makes a senior engineer? What other aspects of being a senior engineer are as important, if not more important, than knowing a programming language inside out. What things can you work on to become or be a better senior engineer (that won't have a new framework out by next week!). This is a set of lessons learned in a journey from self taught front end developer to senior polyglot developer (via ruby).

1. LRUG August 2020 - Matt Bee - Language doesn't matter/ what makes a senior engineer?

Doing the right thing

Chris Zetter:

Ethics are the principles of right and wrong that govern our behaviour. Using examples from my experience, i'll share some tools that you can use to understand ethical decisions and ways to help ourselves and our team make the right choices.

1. LRUG August 2020 - Chris Zetter - Doing the right thing

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.

Registration

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 Chris Lowis on Aug 02, 2020

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.

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.

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.

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.

Registration

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

June 2020 Meeting

The June 2020 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of June, 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 two talks for you this month. There's room for one more lightning talk so get in touch if you'd like to talk about something for no more than 10 minutes. We 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

Hanami, another Opinionated Rack-based Framework

Panos Matsinopoulos:

We present Hanami and its differences to Rails. Then we show an integration case between a Hanami and a Rails project. Finally, we close with a PR on the Hanami project.

Panos is a Senior Software Engineer at Lavanda.

1. LRUG June 2020 - Panos Matsinopoulos - Hanami, another opinionated rack-based framework

Agile or Waterfall; a risk management perspective

Alfredo Motta:

Today Agile is the default choice for software development out there. Every conference, book, or blog post is telling us we are doomed to fail if we don’t follow this established convention. But isn't it surprising to think that Agile is advocated as the right methodology for every possible company doing software out there? Are we going to organize software development exactly the same way if we are working for a startup, NASA, or FedEx? It seems hard to believe. In this presentation, I will explore the mental model to help you choose when you should (or sometimes should not) use Agile using the lenses of risk management. My goal is to provide guidance for the puzzled business owner, project manager, or software developer who wants to pick what's right for their company or team.

1. LRUG June 2020 - Alfredo Motta - Agile or Waterfall; a risk management perspective

Afterwards

Last time there was no afterwards, we just stopped the zoom meeting. That felt a bit abrupt, 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.

Registration

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 Chris Lowis on May 18, 2020

May 2020 Meeting

The May 2020 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th of May, 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 two talks for you in May so far. There's room for at least one more mid-length talk, or a couple of short ones. We constantly 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

Comparing the speed and elegance of different computer languages using a Hamiltonian curve algorithm as the comparator

Peter Bell:

My company (Trapeze) specialises in public transport including schedule optimisation. Finding Hamiltonian curves is a sub-problem to the travelling salesman problem and of the general problem of optimising pickup and drop-offs in demand responsive public transport. This talk will compare implementing a Hamiltonian curve finder in a number of different languages. The talk looks both at the speed of the language and the elegance. For Ruby, I compare a couple of different implementations. Other languages that are compared are Elixir, Go, Javascript, Java, C++, C# and Python.

The source code is in a public Github repository details of which I will provide as part of my talk

1. LRUG May 2020 - Peter Bell - Comparing the speed and elegance of different computer languages

Debugging Ruby HTTP Library Surprises

Sam Joseph:

Some folks prefer 'puts' to debugging with something like pry-byebug, but I'm a huge fan of debuggers, particularly stepping through my own code and the code of the many libraries we all rely on. In combination with bundle open to insert breakpoints into the code of gems being used in your stack, debugging can expose really tricky dependency bugs, as I aim to demonstrate with one that I found in the way different ruby HTTP libraries can interact.

1. LRUG May 2020 - Sam Joseph - Debugging Ruby HTTP Library Surprises

Afterwards

Last time there was no afterwards, we just stopped the zoom meeting. That felt a bit abrupt, 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.

Registration

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 incase.

Do prepare yourself in advance by downloading the zoom client.

Posted by Murray Steele on Apr 25, 2020

April 2020 Meeting

The April 2020 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 6th of April, from 6:20pm to 8:00pm (meeting starts at 6:30pm). The venue this month is provided by…

bzzzzt

vmmmmwwemmwmmmph

PhysicalProximityError: meetings of > 2 people are currently forbidden

That's right folks – while we all collectively do our part to battle COVID-19, LRUG too must adapt for this brave new world of staying the hell indoors.

The good news is that we've done some testing and we think we can hold a decent version of LRUG online, from the safety of our own respective homes. The very kind folks at Cleo have loaned us their generously-appointed Zoom account and we're going to try running the meeting using that this month. There are likely to still be a few rough edges while we learn to translate our super-polished absolutely-no-faffing-around-ever-with-laptops-and-projectors high-production-value process into this new medium, but we will get there in the end.

Full registration details are given below. We will only be sending out joining details to people who have registered, so please do make sure you do it.

Agenda

Food & Drinks

Hopefully you have some to hand. Or you could always nibble on that hoard of toilet paper? Anyway.

We've got two talks for you in April; we've got room for a third, and we desperately need more for the rest of year (cough talks@lrug.org cough), but anyway, where's what we've got so far:

How to take control of code quality

Joel Chippindale:

We all know how valuable it is to keep the quality of your code high. Working on a high quality codebase is more enjoyable and enables us to deliver value much more effectively for our users and yet, time and again I hear engineers saying, “I am not allowed to spend sufficient time on code quality”.

This talk clarifies the value of maintaining a high quality codebase, gives you guidance on how to talk about this to help you get the support of your colleagues and managers for spending time on this and also outlines some key practices that will help you achieve this.

1. LRUG April 2020 - Joel Chippindale - How to take control of code quality

Music Experiments in Sonic Pi

Rob McKinnon:

Let's celebrate Sonic Pi's v3.2 release, scheduled for 28 Feb! Sonic Pi's an open source Ruby code-based music creation and performance tool.

Rob's presenting a few experiments in Sonic Pi, covering oddities such as:

• negative melody
• Jianpu (numbered musical notation)
• just intonation
• microtonal music - 19 EDO (Equal Division of the Octave)
• interfacing with MIDI controllers over USB and bluetooth BLE.

Also Rob will walk us through a memory management improvement PR to Sonic Pi - that may have made it into the release.

Afterwards

Afterwards… well, that's a good question. Obviously there's no pub, but we invite you instead to conjure up the image of a gently roaring fire, and perhaps to open a beer or other beverage while holding that image in your mind, and then think to yourself that it's really a wonder to be alive at all, even in strange times such as these, and really doesn't it demonstrate how much we all rely on each other, on our neighbours and colleagues and friends, and gosh darn it we shouldn't forget that when this is all over, that we truly do need each other, and we shouldn't take each other for granted, and dammit Billy I just gotta say it that I love you dude, I know I shoulda said it before all this, but I want to say it now so you know, you're a good friend Billy, you really are, and thanks for being there for me.

Or there's always telly.

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.

Registration

You can register to attend via eventbrite.

It's vital that you register because we will only be sending out the meeting connection details to those registered attendees. So keep your eyes peeled for an email in your inbox on the day.

Some of you may already be living your days in Zoom meetings but if not, and if you want a head start, you can make sure you have the Zoom client by visiting their download page.

So that's that. All that remains to be said is

REMAIN INDOORS

REMAIN INDOORS

REMAIN INDOORS

Posted by James Adam on Mar 24, 2020

March 2020 Meeting

The March 2020 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of March, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (meeting starts at 6:30pm). The venue this month is provided by Makers and is in their offices, on Commercial Stret. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Food & Drinks

Not only are Makers providing the venue for thie month's meeting, they're also being kind enough to provide some food for us. Thanks again Makers!

I got an email from the Government the other day

Stuart Harrison says:

Email has been around for a long time, predating even the Internet, and despite the best efforts of big tech to monopolise our communications, it's still the most popular way to for people to communicate online. This ubiquity means it's a really easy wayf or Government to keep in touch with us, but email is a tricky thing to manage, running mailservers can be a faff, and email as a service solutions can be expensive. In this talk I'll go through a potted history of email, talk about a tool that the Government Digital Service have developed to make email easier for goverment agencies, and a Ruby gem I've build to make it even easier for Rails devs.

My first Rails bug report

Alex Balhatchet says:

Story time! Here's the bug I found, how we determined it was a bug in Rails 6, how we dealt with it including working around it and submitting the bug report, and finally getting to remove our workaround once the bug was fixed and the new Rails was installed :)

Tech for good with Ruby on Rails

James Hand and Alan Bridger say:

Giki Social Enterprise uses Ruby on Rails to help people live sustainably. We'll talk about what we do and why Rails is such a good framework for helping people to make sustainable and healthy choices.

London Ruby Events

Jairo Diaz says:

I am going to tell you about the Ruby events in London that I am organising such as the Ruby Hacknight and Ruby London Jobs and other events for the community that are the most common. I will also mention different event formats which I have experienced and found useful for different purposes.

Afterwards

We should be finished these talks by 8pm. Usually we head to a local pub afterwards to talk about what we've just heard and get to know our fellow attendees. We'll see what Makers suggest for which is their preferred watering hole and keep you posted if we know in advance.

Of course, even though this is the socialising part and seems more informal, please remember that still we consider it to be a part of the meeting and covered by our code of conduct.

Venue & Registration  

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct which applies to all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Makers
50-52 Commercial Street
London
E1 6PL

See on a map

Registration

You can register to attend via eventbrite.

The venue has a hard limit of 70 people. If you register and realise you can't come, please use eventbrite to give up your place so we can someone else come in your place. We might be able to let in people on the night who haven't registered, but we can't guarantee it.

Posted by Murray Steele on Feb 20, 2020

February 2020 Meeting

The February 2020 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of February, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (meeting starts at 6:30pm). The venue this month is provided by Simply Business and is in their offices, on Gresham St near Bank and Moorgate stations. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Food & Drinks

Simply Business are going to make some food and drink available to us during the meeting to help us stave off hunger pangs while we are amazed by all the talks. Thanks again Simply Business!

Lightning Talks

This meeting is our annual lightning talks only event. None of the talks are longer than 10 minutes, and so there's something for everyone.

You don't know what you don't know

Elena Tanasoiu says:

How to start an investigation into transitioning from a monolith to a microservice architecture. A number of issues to consider before you start and how to make a list of blockers on the way.

1. LRUG February 2020 - Elena Tanasoiu - You don't know what you don't know

Designing Domain-Oriented Observability in your system

Alfredo Motta says:

What does it mean to make a system observable? Too often this is translated into simply installing technical tools to measure low-level concerns like memory, CPU or background queues size. In this talk, I will present the concept of Domain-Oriented Observability, explore how it affects the cost of maintaining your system and finally show some of the tools and solutions that can help you put it into practice.

Semantic Versioning, Ruby Versoning, and the forward march of progress

Jon Rowe is going to tell us about how ruby versioning interprets semantic versioning, and the problems that brings for maintainers of projects like rspec that support multiple versions of ruby.

1. LRUG February 2020 - Jon Rowe - Semantic Versioning, Ruby Versoning, and the forward march of progress

Influence your company beyond code

Mugurel Chirica says:

It's important for all the engineers to realise that individually they are able to help shape a company's culture, tech excellence, and tech direction.

There are various ways to achieve this, in this talk I'll present some of the common options while focusing on creating communities of practice - groups of people that meet with a common goal in mind and relevant to the company's interest, both sponsored by leadership or started by engineers.

1. LRUG February 2020 - Mugurel Chirica - Influence your company beyond code

From confusion to contribution

Nitish Rathi says:

How I refactored my way into an open source codebase, starting from a state of confusion and ending up contributing to mocha, and some things I learned along the way.

1. LRUG February 2020 - Nitish Rathi - From confusion to contribution

How to manage happy remote development teams

Ali Najaf says:

Things I learned about how to manage and work on distributed software development teams while keeping everyone happy, at least some of the time.

1. LRUG February 2020 - Ali Najaf - How to manage remove development teams

Afterwards

These lightning talks should be finished by 8pm after which we'll go to a local pub to talk about all the things we've heard. We'll defer to our hosts for a suitable venue, and we'll make sure it does food for any who may still be hungry.

Of course, even though this is the socialising part and seems more informal, please remember that still we consider it to be a part of the meeting and covered by our code of conduct.

Venue & Registration  

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct which applies to all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Simply Business
4th Floor
99 Gresham St
London
EC2R 7HE

See on a map

Registration

You can register to attend via eventbrite.

The venue has a hard limit of 100 people. If you register and realise you can't come, please use eventbrite to give up your place so we can someone else come in your place. We might be able to let in people on the night who haven't registered, but we can't guarantee it.

Posted by Murray Steele on Jan 24, 2020

January 2020 Meeting

The January 2020 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of January, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (meeting starts at 6:30pm). The venue this month is provided by GoCardless and is in their offices, on Goswell Road. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Food & Drinks

Not only are GoCardless letting us into their offices to run is meeting, they're also putting on some food and drink to get us through the evening. Thanks again GoCardless!

Ruby Talent Show

This meeting is dedicated to all the things ruby can do that isn't just pulling data out of a database and rendering it on a website.

Ruby on the Big Screen

Steve Butterworth says:

Using Ruby to crunch the numbers, read tv captions and drive a 30m long LED screens at The Open Golf Championships. A whistle stop tour of the setup, the architecture and the code that goes into making something like this work and what can go wrong!

Re-interpreting data

Murray Steele says:

Some time ago I stumbled across the header description for WAV files and wondered, what if I took a file and calculated the appropriate WAV file header for it, could I hear my data? Yes, you can. You probably don't want to, but you can. You can do something similar with BMP and MIDI files too!

Ruby's a critic

Nuno Silva says:

RubyCritic provides a report about code quality. You can run it locally to view how your project is doing and what are the smelly spots. A way of getting sense of how your code quality is evolving over time is by setting it up on your CI and storing the reports artefacts.

Getting started with mruby

Fred Cheung says:

find out what mruby is, why you might want to use it and obstacles you might encounter along the way.

You?

We’d like to hear from people using ruby for something that is a bit out of the ordinary. Mostly we’re probably all using ruby for building websites, or for devops, but that’s not all ruby can do.

Some examples:

• making music
• generating graphics
• interactive chatbots
• games
• etc…

So, what are you making ruby do that fits the bill? Or, what are you using ruby for that doesn’t fit that bill, but also isn’t a standard webapp? We'd love to hear about it, whatever it is. Show us what ruby can do!

Afterwards

Our goal is to be finished exploring ruby's talents by 8pm, after which we'll move to a nearby pub to talk about the talents on show and do a spot of socialising. We'll take advice from GoCardless on which local pub will best accommodate us and keep you posted if we know in advance.

Of course, even though this is the socialising part and seems more informal, please remember that still we consider it to be a part of the meeting and covered by our code of conduct.

Venue & Registration  

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct which applies to all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

The address of the venue:

GoCardless
Sutton Yard
65 Goswell Rd
London
EC1V 7EN

See on a map

Registration

You can register to attend via eventbrite.

The venue has a hard limit of 50 people. If you register and realise you can't come, please use eventbrite to give up your place so we can someone else come in your place. We might be able to let in people on the night who haven't registered, but we can't guarantee it.

Posted by Murray Steele on Dec 22, 2019

December 2019 Meeting

The December 2019 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of December, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (meeting starts at 6:30pm). The venue this month is provided by Farmdrop and is in their offices, near Old Street. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Food

Not only are Farmdrop providing the venue for this meeting, they've also kindly offered to supply some food to get us through the evening. Thanks again Farmdrop!

Make Your System Observable

Gerhard Lazu says:

This is what happened when RabbitMQ became more observable. The same benefits apply to your product too. Let me show you why.

What does it mean for a system to be observable? Why is observability a requirement? How does it make everything better?

Afterwards

We aim to finish the talks by 8pm, although likely earlier if there isn't a full complement of them, and will head to a nearby pub shortly after to discuss what we've just heard and socialise. Check back sooner to find out which pub we'll head to.

Of course, even though this is the socialising part and seems more informal, please remember that still we consider it to be a part of the meeting and covered by our code of conduct.

Venue & Registration  

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README paying close attention to the code of conduct which applies to all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Farmdrop
Classic House
6th floor
174-180 Old Street
EC1V 9BP

See on a map

Registration

Farmdrop need a list of names and email addresses for reception so please complete this form for our new hosts.

The venue has a hard limit of 40 people and we'll manage this via that form. If you register and realise you can't come, you'll be able to edit your response and we can then let more people come along. We might be able to let in people on the night who haven't registered, but I wouldn't chance it.

Posted by Murray Steele on Nov 25, 2019