RSpec 3 is the recently released new major version of
RSpec. It contains a host of new features, and has
removed or altered many old ones. In this talk we’ll
cover the most significant changes that were made in
RSpec 3, the upgrade path between RSpec 2 and 3 and
some of the common pitfalls that you might fall into
when using this new major version of RSpec.
That all sounds super-interesting and we'll want to talk it all over together, but we have to be out of Skills Matter by 8pm. Don't worry though, that doesn't mean the evening is over! The Slaughtered Lamb is a short walk away and has plenty of space for us to have those discussions. No need to register for this bit, if you can't make the talks do feel free to turn up just for the socialising afterwards.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Can a programming language be fast yet highly
dynamic? The creators of Julia, a new language with
a numeric focus intends to answer yes.
In this talk we will introduce the language, and
discuss some of its design and implementation
decisions that make it particularly amenable to
generating efficient machine code. We will also talk
about Julia's impressive language interop features,
and see examples of calling Ruby code from within Julia.
I'll be looking at the basic technical concepts
of the Platform As A Service paradigm (eg; Heroku)
and what Docker and Ruby can contribute to it.
Some of the highlights will be; using Docker
inside Docker, how to test this complex stack
and concurrency using the Celluloid gem.
After the talks are finished we leave Skills Matter and move to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the evening. We finish the talks at about 8pm, so if you only want to attend this informal part aim to be at the pub by about 8:10 and you should be just in time to fight with us for room at the bar.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
The Unix command line has been the foundation of how
we use computers for over four decades, and has
changed surprisingly little in that time. I'll look at
what it takes to elevate a throwaway one-liner or
personal script into a robust and re-usable CLI app,
and look at the Ruby techniques that make it easy to
be a good Unix citizen.
Sonic Pi is a Ruby-based live coding music
synthesiser designed to help teach both computing
and music within schools. It uses fast feedback,
liveness and studio-quality sound production as a
means to engage school children in introductory
coding. In this talk we will follow the story of
Sonic Pi from its the humble beginnings of this
project in a single class of school-children coding
beeps and bleeps to its current standing as a
state-of-the-art live coding system installed by
default on all Raspberry Pis used to live code
in a variety of venues from Algoraves to national
music venues. All towards a simple but deep
question - how can we give more people an understanding
of what programming is and can do?
Our talks finish around about 8pm, but the meeting continues in the more relaxed surroundings of The Slaughtered Lamb. Most attendees stick around for this bit, so it's a good chance to catch up with old friends or make some new ones as you discuss the talks and chat about the latest goings on in the ruby community. Attendance of the formal part is not a prerequisite for attending the pub bit, so do come along!
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
You'll never guess what happens next? Mazz will talk about some
of the essential skills that good technical leaders exhibit and
the information you need to know about to help you become good
at leading and not turn into a terrible person. Do you find
yourself in a position of leadership and don't know what to do
now? Do you think you're a great tech lead? Do you wonder if
you're cut out to lead one day? Great, then come and listen to
my talk, you may find it more relevant to your interests than
you realise.
Bebox helps automating the provisioning of environments in which
Ruby on Rails applications run, easing the reproduction of new
server setups every time.
Bebox's main concern is the structure. It is generally a good
idea to have conventions about how different source code files
are placed and named and be able to use this to reduce the
details required to understand a project while also providing
automation in key places. These conventions may include things
like: how to write puppet modules, how to integrate them into
the projects, a directory structure for the projects, how to
have a replicated “development/test” environment into virtual
machines, etc.
Having recently completed the training phase of WeGotCoders I
will present some code from my final project of the 12 week
training course / some code recently pulled into Diaspora*.
With more and more of us choosing this route, the aim is to
show those interested in the 'Immersion' model (either
attending a course, or hiring someone who has joined a course)
what someone with no prior coding experience can achieve
within 12 weeks.
When the talks finish there's usually lots to mull over and talk about. We have to leave Skills Matter's offices, but we don't stop the meeting; it continues at The Slaughtered Lamb which is a 5 minute walk away. If you are unable to attend the talks, or miss out on a space, come join us for the socialising afterwards.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
ArangoDB is a multi-purpose NoSQL database. There are a lot
of features in it but without a proper high level library
for common web frameworks no one will use a database these
days. No matter how fancy it is. Guacamole is an ODM for
ArangoDB to be used in Rack-based framework and especially
Rails. I will talk about the design choices, caveats and my
the general experience working on that kind of library. The
talk will not go too deep into technical details and should
be interesting to novice and experts alike.
Music theory can seem arcane and unapproachable. But underneath
the weird names and symbols, the basics are actually pretty
simple. The real issue is that the documentation is bad and the
API is worse! In this talk I will show how to start with nothing
but a ruby interpreter, and generate sine waves, notes, scales,
modes, chords, arpeggios and songs, in a way that will be
understandable to those who have never touched an instrument
before and will (hopefully) offer an interesting new perspective
even to those who are already well versed in music theory.
The presentation-based part of the meeting ends at 8pm and we move to the social part of the meeting shortly after. For this 2nd half we switch venues to The Slaughtered Lamb so if you can't make the talks, or don't register in time, feel free to turn up just for this pub bit.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Continuous Deliverance - set your development free #
John Maxwell wants to talk to us about automated deployment:
The first principle of the Agile Manifesto says “Our highest
priority is to satisfy the customer through early and
continuous delivery of valuable software”, yet too often this
is not the reality. Delivery is one of the most disruptive
parts of the software development process for developers, but
can be easy to automate, empowering the iterative process.
This talk is a manifesto for how to go from scratch to
automated deployment, with a few tales from the trenches of
mistakes made along the way.
RSpec 3 has just been released, and it's come a long way since
version 1. If you've had problems with RSpec in the past, now
is a great time to revisit it — it's become much cleaner, simpler
and more focused. I'll give a quick overview of the main things
that have changed over the years, and if there's time, I'll
explain a few of the new features in version 3.
A short talk about my experience starting out as a professional
developer. The focus of this talk will be about a weekly event
through which I received a huge amount of support called Codebar.
At Codebar programming skills are taught for free to people
underrepresented in the tech industry.
Our talks finish up around 8pm and you can find us crowding The Slaughtered Lamb by about 8:10pm. We're a friendly group and this part of the evening is the perfect time to talk to the speakers and other attendees about the talks or other goings-on in the wider Ruby world. If you didn't make the talks you're still welcome to come along for this pub bit!
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Hola amigos! We need to have a chat about data structures
and algorithms. I've been messing around with them on-and-off
over the past few years and I believe you'll find spending
more time learning them valuable. Here's what I'm going to
talk about:
Why you should bother learning about them at all, especially if you think you won't use them at work.
Some fun examples of data structures/algos you've heard of (and probably some you haven't) and how they're put to work in software you use every day.
Ways of learning them that I've found to be fun and effective.
I swear in the name of Knuth that there shall be no mention of
big-o notation or sorting algorithms. Also, I will attempt a
live demo of one of the algos using the SATR transport
protocol. It probably won't work if you are good at the maths
and feeling mischievous.
We have to leave Skills Matter's offices by 8pm so we continue the meeting in a nearby pub, The Slaughtered Lamb. This is a great opportunity to chat to the speakers and other group members; even if you can't make it for the talks earlier in the evening.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Adam Rogers has a talk for us about working as a team better:
In 1936, Dale Carnegie wrote the book "How to win friends and influence people".
You may have heard of it. But what can this book, and others, teach us about
working as part of a software team today? Quite a lot, actually.
We'll look at a few points that'll help us to work better, together.
Ruby on Rails has always been optimized for a single monolithic application
architecture. But as applications grow, it has become more and more common
for architects to seek out ways to break their monolithic Rails apps into
self-contained services. For years the most natural answer of how to hook
up one Rails app to another's API has been to use ActiveResource, a core
Rails plugin that provides an ActiveRecord-like interface to an external service.
The allure of such a simple interface to a network service is undeniable, but
the downsides not nearly as obvious. Many have built Rails apps relying on
ActiveResource only to feel significant unforeseen pain down the line. This
talk provides a case study of an early adopter of ActiveResource during the
Rails 1.2 era, the pain that it led to, and the eventual replacement of
ActiveResource with a bespoke private gem that provides a similar, but more
robust interface.
The second part of the evening starts after the talks finish, which is usually around 8pm, and we move from Skills Matter's offices to The Slaughtered Lamb. If you can't make the talks do feel free to head over to the pub to join us for this more informal side to the meeting.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Adventures in early-adoption of open-source code #
Some of the team from the ODI want to present about their work:
Last year, the ODI found themselves wanting to use the
code behind gov.uk for a new project.
In this talk James
and Sam from the ODI
tech team will share their experience of picking up a codebase
which was open source, but never
really designed for reuse, and what they learned along the way.
Many of us developers love arguing about architecture that
we dislike and refactoring our code to loosen coupling and
weaken dependencies between our objects. Unfortunately,
some overarching parts of our applications, like persistence,
networking, notifications, logging, auditing, are scattered
in our code, forcing us to specific explicit dependencies
between them and our domain objects.
Aspect-oriented programming
is a solution to the problem of some features affecting
virtually all business requirements, and expresses that problem
in a compact and DRY way.
In this practical talk, Camille will:
introduce the basic concepts of AOP, and how it is still relevant even in a non-statically typed language like Ruby
show you how to easily and quickly leverage some AOP principles in your Rails application
play with some AOP-friendly constructs in Ruby 2, in particular TracePoint
walk you through two existing Ruby frameworks to practice Aspect-Oriented Programming
She will even attempt to prove that not all things coming from the Java world are necessarily bad.
After the talks finish, usually 8pm, we decamp to The Slaughtered Lamb to finish up the evening. Although you have to register for the talks, the pub part is open to all. If you can't make the talks feel free to turn up for this second half of the event.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
A story about the problems we faced modelling state and
recording state changes at GoCardless and how we
generalised our solution to those problems into a new
gem, Statesman.
I’m a relative newcomer to Ruby, but I’ve got lots of experience in
marketing.
Over the last two years I’ve spoken to many experienced devs about
their marketing challenges, and witnessed how simple marketing
mistakes can derail a project.
In the consumer goods industry marketing is a discipline, with
structured ways of working through it. I will demonstrate that
this structure works well for tech startups, and give you a
practical checklist you can apply.
I would like to talk about a series of custom-made infrastructure
components that I’ve built over several months to support a hosted
e-commerce app that I run in my spare time.
This consists of a central events hub written in Go, to which the
user-facing apps send events, and a series of Go and Ruby scripts
subscribing to said events on a ZMQ socket and doing varied things
such as analytics, periodical backups and house-keeping.
The code I’ll show is mostly Go, with some Ruby to illustrate how
this all hooks in to my Ruby apps and existing infrastructure. I’ll
try to show why Go is great for writing small, focused scripts that
support your user facing apps.
You can read a more detailed overview on a blog post he wrote about it a while ago.
Our talks usually end at 8pm, but that's not when the evening ends. Most of the attendees head over to The Slaughtered Lamb to talk things over; the speakers are usually there too, so you can ask them about their talks if you didn't get a chance during Q&A. The pub part of the evening open to all, so if you couldn't make the talks, or just don't fancy them, do turn up here!
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
February is our annual lightning talk evening and as usual we're using the 20x20 format for the talks. If you've never encountered this format before it's when the speaker has 20 slides that auto-transition after 20 seconds, giving them a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds in which to get their point across.
Once we finish up with the talks we head over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the evening in more informal, if admittedly slightly noisier surroundings. If you can't make it for the talks feel free to pop along to the pub for about 8pm, which is when we usually finish up.
The nice people at ReThink Recruitment are buying some drinks at the pub after the talks. Thanks!
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Javier Ramirez wants to tell us about dealing with big data:
At teowaki we have a system for API usage analytics,
with Redis as a fast intermediate store and
bigquery as a big data
backend. As a result, we can launch aggregated queries on our
traffic/usage data in just a few seconds and we can try and find
for usage patterns that wouldn’t be obvious otherwise.
In this session I will talk about how we entered the Big Data
world, which alternatives we evaluated, and how we are using
Redis and Bigquery to solve our problem.
As traffic grows, some of the data structures our application
has to manipulate gets contended. Ours is an unusual, but
effective solution: segregate data into read-mostly and
write-mostly.
We aim to finish the talks by 8pm and continue the evening in more informal surroundings at The Slaughtered Lamb. Our speakers are usually in attendance so if you have any questions for them you didn't get a chance to ask at the talks, or just want to thank them for their time this is the perfect place for it. If you didn't make it in time for the talks, you can also come along just for this part of the evening to talk to your fellow rubyists.
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts Skills Matter. It helps to make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on the same night. Also, it's polite (don't forget MINASWAN), so please do register with Skills Matter. Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our README.
You can also follow this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell Skills Matter you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
