My talk is based on an article called "Japanese and OO" which was
written by a Japanese guy who wrote Windows 95 and his thought
around what helped him to build the software as a Japanese. I
really enjoyed the article and thought it relates to Ruby which is
written by another Japanese (the Matz). I will also add some of
my own thoughts onto the talk.
Sean was ill so he didn't make this meeting, he did however make it to our January 2011 meeting.
Sean O'Halpin is going to tell us about some work at the BBC involving twitter:
I'll be talking about how we're using Ruby to process tweets in
realtime to discover inbound links to the BBC Zeitgeist
and how we're reading the Twitter Firehose (about 1000 tweets/sec =
about 90 million a day) and storing the data in Amazon S3.
Our meetings have space, usually at the start, but also between the talks if there's a lot of laptop faffing, for announcements from the audience. If you have something you think is of interest to the group; perhaps a new conferences has announced their CFP or ticket discount, or there's a new gem you want to let people know about, or maybe your team of awesome ninja rockstars is hiring. Whatever! There's no need to ask permission; get up, say your thing and sit down again. Just be quick so you don't run on into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.
After the talks we'll brave the cold and head to The Slaughtered Lamb for some drinks and more informal chatter. Our talks usually finish at about 8pm, and you'll find us jostling for space at the bar shortly after. If you won't make it for the main meeting, feel free to pop along just for the pub bit.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
Priit Tamboon - Using git hooks for staging and production #
Git has taken the Ruby world by storm, and many of us are using 'git push' on a daily basis. Priit is going to talk about how to use git hooks and will highlight some everyday tips that he has developed and found useful. He's also going to talk about easy ways to replicate Heroku-like deployment for smaller projects using git.
Kalv will give an overview of Websockets and how to get a simple app up and running with Cramp. He'll walk through creating a chat based app using Cramp & websockets and will talk briefly on security and authentication with websockets.
We start the meetings with short announcements about anything and everything that the group might be interested in. We announce when people are hiring, we announce new conferences that people might want to attend or present at, we announce interesting blog posts to spark debate in the pub afterwards. Anything goes really! You don't have to ask for permission, just get up and say your piece, but keep it quick so you don't run on into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.
At the end of the evening we'll all head on over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the meeting in more informal surroundings. The main meeting should finish around 8pm, so you'll find us ordering our drinks at the bar shortly after. If you don't think you can make it for the workshop you really should think about coming along for drinks later on, as no doubt there'll be lots of interesting chat in the pub.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
Joseph Wilk will be sharing his experiences on how you should and
shouldn't use Cucumber to test your applications, but rather than a
straight forward presentation with him boring everyone with lots of
long winded slides he's going to run the evening in a workshop format.
Consider it a self help group for Cucumber users where we all get to
share things that have and have not worked for us.
There will be some introduction patterns and case studies of good
Cucumber practices that he's come across to get things rolling. Coming
armed with your own ideas, experiences or complaints will help prevent
us all staring at the floor and shuffling our feet.
So if you're using Cucumber and are having problems, if you are not
yet sold on it and want some tips, if you think its the source of all
evil in the world, head along to this self help group. It would be
great if people could share some of the ideas you have brewing in your
mind before hand. Just get in touch with Joseph directly or via the LRUG mailing list and help make this a Cuketastic (sorry) workshop!
We start the meetings with short announcements about anything and everything that the group might be interested in. We announce when people are hiring, we announce new conferences that people might want to attend or present at, we announce interesting blog posts to spark debate in the pub afterwards. Anything goes really! You don't have to ask for permission, just get up and say your piece, but keep it quick so you don't run on into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.
At the end of Joseph's cucumber workshop we'll all head on over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the meeting in more informal surroundings. The main meeting should finish around 8pm, so you'll find us ordering our drinks at the bar shortly after. If you don't think you can make it for the workshop you really should think about coming along for drinks later on, as no doubt there'll be lots of interesting cucumber chat in the pub. And maybe a few interesting cucumber drinks too.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), 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.
Priit Tamboom would like to talk about Rails 3 internals:
Recently I have been porting an app into Rails 3 and probably you have
also been poking this new Rails 3 with ruby 1.9.2.
Therefore I would like to discuss a bit more about Rails 3 itself.
Particularly, things under railties lib directory covering classes
such as Railtie, Engine, Application and will go through
initialization with initializers.
Along the way I'll show some examples how you can use this knowledge
in your own gem or plugin.
Nothing too fancy but should be useful for developing your next Rails
3 project.
Alex MacCaw will talk about moving state to the client side as opposed to the more traditional request/response model. He'll go through the various options, such as Syncro (the successor to Juggernaut), and SuperApp (his JS framework).
We start the meetings with announcements for the group. If there's something you think the group should know, or something you're looking for help with, this is the time to say it. You don't have to ask for permission, just get up and say your piece. Just keep it short so you don't eat into the time for the scheduled talks. In fact if it's longer than a minute, maybe you should think about doing a longer talk.
When all the talking is over we break ranks and head out for some beer. Our chosen pub The Slaughtered Lamb which is about 5 minutes from the Skills Matter office. The main meeting finishes around 8pm and you'll find us joslting for service at the bar shortly after. If you don't think you can make it for the talks, you should come along for the beers, as the talks are really just an excuse for going to the pub afterwards.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), 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.
Tim Cowlishaw and Chris O'Sullivan have been working together on an older project of theirs and want to share some things they've learned about making it a nicer project to work on.
Most of us want better software development processes, and spend a lot of
time reading and talking about methods for making better software. However,
when you've already been working on a project for a long time, entropy can
get the better of you, making it difficult to adapt your working practices.
We've been working on a project like this that started 18 months ago, and
over the last few months have been steadily improving how we go about things,
getting better at BDD and Scrum, and starting to do a bit of Domain Driven
Design. We're going to talk about how we got on, focusing in equal parts on
refactoring legacy code bases, improving test coverage, and improving
processes, as well as revealing the incredible powers of suggestion we
employed to convince stakeholders, management and sundry doubters that this
was a good idea.
Tom Crinson will talk about Cramp and some of the other technologies he's used in his HTML5 Bomberman clone. Tom says:
You'll find out how and why I use cramp to cope with hundreds of simultaneous
players on ittybittyboom.com. Cramp is an asynchronous
event driven ruby based framework based upon event machine that allows the coder to
write succinct, clear code to deal with hundreds or thousands of tcp connections at once.
Our meetings start with a short period where we make announcements about things going on in the community. If you have something you think the rest of the group might want to know about; an event, a new gem, a blog post, a company that's hiring or even just to introduce yourself, then this is the time and place to do it. The only rules are that you can't go on about it, we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.
After the talks we head on over to the more informal surroundings of The Slaughtered Lamb to finish the evening with a beer and maybe a fish-finger sandwich. If you can't make it to for the talks, we'll be heading to the pub at around 8pm, so we can see you there.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), 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.
Jonathan Leighton has recently completed a project for his third year at University, which he thinks we might be interested in:
I ended up writing an interpreter, in Ruby, for a language
heavily inspired by Ruby. A sort of distilled Ruby-like language which
is far too simplistic to be useful and probably overlooks tonnes of
important things.
But anyway! The point is not really that the language is utterly
pointless. The point is that it's an interpreter written in a very
high-level language, which I think it relatively easy to understand.
So I'm offering to do a talk which would take the listener through the
workings of this interpreter. The parsing is done with Treetop, although
I wouldn't propose really talking about the parsing at all as I think a
lot of people are quite familiar with Treetop.
I might as well finish with some buzzwords. If you ever wondered what
"trampoline function" or "continuation passing style" means then this is
your chance :)
Phil Cowans has recently been working on a rails plugin called ActionEmbedding, and he'd like to show it to us:
ActionEmbedding is a simple Rails plugin I've been using to look at
ways of building up pages from independent user interface elements
called pagelets. The idea is to implement a number of different patterns,
including Hierarchical MVC, and make it as easy as possible to switch
between them. I'll try to explain why I think this is a good idea, show
you what the plugin can do at the moment and talk about how I see it evolving.
We start the meeting with a short amount of time where anyone in the room can make an announcement. In the past few months it's mostly been the LRUG job board, but that's not all we want people to talk about. If you've written some fancy new gem and want to tell people about it, this is the time and place to do it. If you read a controversial article about some aspect of ruby that you want to draw people's attention to, this is a great time to mention it. If you've got your finger on the pulse and know about some new hack day or other geek event, this is the room full of people you should mention it to. The rules are simple, you just have to be quick.
We aim to finish up the formal proceedings of the evening at 8pm. After that we head to a local pub, The Slaughtered Lamb, and have some beers and a chat. If you fancy some lively ruby discussion, but you can't make it for 6:30 you are more than welcome to head straight to the pub. Just look for a group of people wildly debating the syntax of the latest version of RSpec and you'll have found the right group.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), 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.
Murray Steele wants to talk about the first ruby script he ever wrote, and he thinks you might be interested because (in his own words from the mailing list thread where he proposed the talk):
It's a mailing list with a web front-end. The web stuff is pre-rails and I think it's interesting in terms of "look how far we've come". Seriously, if you've never done web development without a higher-level framework like rails you'll be amazed. (For anyone who's heard of it, it uses NARF).
I can pretty much guarantee that my first ruby code is worse than your first ruby code. So for any newbies in the room, it should come as welcome relief that even apparent old-hands like myself have written terrible code (and it truly is terrible code), made terrible design decisions, and done both without the safety net of TDD. Of course, hopefully in the talk I'll point out why, if writing this again, I would use TDD. At the end I hope this talk will make people feel less embarrassed about showing off code of their own at future events; I'll be setting a base-level of awfulness.
This bit of software was written in a weekend and has been in "production" for 7 years 11 months (according to the date I filled in for "when I first started using Ruby" on my Working With Rails profile) and it's been remarkably stable and unchanged for those 7 years. I've no real evidence for this, but it's a scientific fact that it's the longest running piece of ruby software in the world… wouldn't you like to see inside it?
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
We in the Ruby Community seem to have a habit of re-inventing things. Sometimes this is for good reason, but in some cases we don't know we're even doing it! We're wasting valuable time that could be spent learning Erlang!
UNIX-like operating systems have been around for decades and lots of problems have come and gone in that time. I'm going to talk about some of the tools available that can be used to solve common Ruby and Rails deployment and development problems.
As per usual there will be some time at the start of the meeting for anyone in the group to get up and let us know about anything you think is relevant to the group. Recently it's just been recruitment announcements, which are great, but it'd be even better if people mentioned some other news items; maybe you've just released a top-notch gem, or read a thought-provoking article you want to let people know about, or there's some event you've spotted that you think rubyists would be interested in. It's really up to you what you say, just keep it short because we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.
The meeting usually finishes at around 8pm, but that's not the end of the evening. We can be found at around 8:05pm jostling for service at The Slaughtered Lamb. If you're not going to make it to the main meeting, you really should come along to the pub for a quick drink and a bit of a blather.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are coming to the meeting. On a few exceptional occasions we've had to turn away people who haven't registered, but this has only been at extremely popular meetings, and has yet to happen at the new venue on Goswell Road. It's better to be safe than sorry though, and it is polite (don't forget MINASWAN), 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.
Dan Lucraft is going to talk to us about ruby profilers, specifically his jruby-prof gem. Even though his gem is for jruby only, he's going to give us a good grounding on "pure" ruby profilers first.
Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant and Kyoto Cabinet: the world of Mikio ware #
Makoto Inoue gave a short talk at the recent nosqleu conference about Tokyo Cabinet and he offered to give a slightly retooled (and more ruby focussed) version of that talk for us. The blurb for his original talk is as follows:
Tokyo Cabinet is one of the first "Key Value"
stores. It was released in 2007, but surprisingly small number of people knows
what it is really capable of. Makoto, the maintainer of
Tokyo Cabinet Wiki will unveil
the core philosophy and exciting features behind these products.
John Leach kindly offered to do a version of this talk (previously given at Conferencia Rails 2009 and Scottish Ruby Conference 2010), but unfortunately he had to pull out at the last minute due to a double booking. We'll try to reschedule this talk for a future meeting.
There'll always be time at the start of the meeting (and between the speakers) for anyone in the group to get up and say something. Use this time to let us know about anything you think is relevant to the group: maybe announce that your awesome team is hiring, or that you've just released a really interesting gem, or draw people's attention to a controversial blog post, or event to ask for some help working on a personal project. It's really up to you what you say, just keep it short because we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.
We aim to finish at about 8:30pm, after which we make the short walk from Skills Matter's offices to our watering hole of choice: The Slaughtered Lamb. Even if you can't make the formal part of the evening, you know where we are if you want to pop along for some of the more informal chat. You'll be more than welcome.
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are planning to come to the meeting. If you forget to register it's unlikely that you'd be turned away at the door, but it has happened before when we've been really busy. Even without the worry of being turned away hanging over your head, it's useful for fire regulations and to help our hosts arrange the room properly. And most importantly it's simple manners (don't forget MINASWAN), 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.
Seth Edwards, one of the committers to the C# driver for MongoDB (and who plays with the ruby driver in his spare time) is in town and in has volunteered to give us a talk on MongoDB. He'll cover the use-cases for why we might want to use MongoDB in our apps and also give examples of using the ruby driver.
As usual we'll have 10-15 minutes at the start of the meeting for anyone to fill up with something they think might be of interest to the group. It's really up to you what you say: announce a gem you've written, ask for help on a project, say you are interested in talking to someone in the pub after wards who knows about a particular gem, or even just say hi. the only rule is to keep it short as there'll be others who want to say something and we don't want to eat into the time for the scheduled talks.
When the talks are finished, we make the short walk over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the evening in a more informal setting. The talks tend to finish around about 8pm so if you find that you can't make it to the meeting but still fancy some Ruby chat, head along for just the pub bit. Maybe you can score us a table?
Skills Matter prefer that you register your attendance with them if you are planning to come to the meeting. You won't be turned away at the door if you haven't registered (unless we're really full), but it's useful for fire regulations and to help them arrange the room properly. Finally, it's simply just polite, and well, MINASWAN, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!).
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 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.
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.
Julian couldn't make it because of inclement weather.
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.</strike>
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
