February 2011 Meeting
The LRUG February 2011 meeting will be on Monday the 7th of February, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will be providing the space, at their offices on Goswell Road; The Skills Matter eXchange. It's a great space with plenty of room for the group, but you still need to register to let Skills Matter know you are coming.
Agenda
Lightning talks!
It's February, so this means it's time for our annual lightning talk evening. This means lots of short talks all in one night. Because that's not quite fun enough, we use the 20x20 format for the talks. This means each speaker has 20 slides that auto-transition after 20 seconds, giving them 6 minutes 40 seconds to get their point across. It's a fun format for a talk, as the rigid time constraints mean the speakers have to choose between explaining their opinions in detail (and missing out something else) or stating them as fact. This is especially fun when the opinions are controversial.
The brave 20x20ers for 2011 are (in alphabetical order, on the night the talks will be randomised):
James Adam
an exploration of why nobody needs to write any more test frameworks
Ed Davey
ruby search systems (Sunspot, acts_as_ferret, ultraspinx, thinking_sphinx, acts_as_solr, acts_as_xapian, xapit, raw mysql)
Ben Griffiths
Gerhard Lazu
How do we suck in 480 books per second from Amazon's API using Ruby via Redis into MongoDB
Chris Lowis
W3C Audio XG Group (audio + javascript)
Neil Middleton
Riding Rails through a TV induced storm
Jim Myhrberg
Tom Stuart
ARel / Relational Algebra
Tom ten Thij
xpath + xpath use patterns in capybara
Looks like a fun night!
Pub
These short talks are bound to raise more questions than they answer and to answer those questions we'll head over to The Slaughtered Lamb. It's only five minutes from Skills Matter's offices and does a killer fish-finger sandwich. The talks will probably finish around 8pm, so if for some reason you aren't able to make it for the talks (but you really should try), head to the pub for about 8pm and you'll find blocking all reasonable access to the bar for about 20-30 minutes. Maybe get there a bit earlier?
Registration
Skills Matter ask 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. This has only been at extremely popular meetings and has yet to happen at Goswell Road, but it's better to be safe than sorry though. It is just good manners though (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but be aware this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Posted by Murray Steele on Jan 16, 2011