April 2009 Meeting
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 20th of April, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at their overflow venue (if you've never been you can use this handy map to find it). On very busy nights we've had to turn people away, so make sure that you do register your attendance early to avoid this.
Agenda
There was a very positive response to the February lightning talk meeting, but organising eight or nine speakers is a bit of a hassle, so we're going to try out having three shorter talks instead of two longer ones. The Guinea Pig talks for this are:
Ruby Invoicing Framework Gem
Martin Kleppmann is the author of the invoicing gem (on GitHub) and is going to give a talk about it. The invoicing gem provides a solid basis for any commercial web app, by solving the standard problems of financial transactions neatly and concisely, allowing you to focus on the business logic, and being flexible enough to grow and handle pretty complex stuff when you need it: multi-currency support, international taxation and reseller networks, for example. Under the hood it's basically a full accrual accounting system, but that is hidden behind a clean Ruby API which requires no accounting knowledge. Martin will also touch on OAccounts, an initiative to create an open standard for exchanging accounting data between different apps.
A Modular Approach to Views
Jon Gilbraith has been working on taking a modular approach to views and creating builder classes to abstract structural html and view logic into Ruby blocks. In this talk he's going to present that approach and some of the stuff he's learnt along the way.
Using Geokit in Social Apps
Paul Jensen is going to give a talk about using Geokit, with a particular focus on it's use in Social Apps. Geokit is a rubygem and Rails plugin for geocoding, distance calculation, location finding, and ip address-based lookup. In this talk he'll run through the functionality provided by Geokit, and show off the magic in action with a google maps/twitter/trusted places mashup.
Pub
After three talks it's likely we'll need some kind of liquid comfort. Luckily there's a convenient pub just a short walk from either of the Skills Matter venues: The Crown Tavern. We aim to finish the talks and be crowding the bar by about 8:00pm. If you can't make it to the main meeting you should use this info to turn up at about 7:50pm and get the drinks in.
Mine's a Franziskaner.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. You should register as early as you can, so do so now! If we need a big room Skills Matter need about a week to book it, and will only do so if the registrations dictate it, so registering late means you might get put on a waiting list or turned away. And 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.
Posted by Murray Steele on Mar 23, 2009