Sam Joseph is going to lead us through a practical exercise he calls "CodeWarsJam". He describes it as follows:
A CodeWarsJam is a session where small teams of coders work on the same coding
problem together. The problems are usually relatively simple and can be
reviewed as a group every 20 minutes or so. Recently at
MakersAcademy we've had great fun with
CodeWarsJams, where we take coding kata from http://codewars.com
and use them to run a CodeWarsJam. CodeWarsJam is great because when you
solve a problem you get to see all the other variant solutions that others
have coded, sorted by popularity. Come join the festive coding fun as LRUG's
first CodeWarsJam!
The organisers of Beyond, a conference aimed at junior developers in London on 23rd November, have provided a pair of free tickets for 1 lucky LRUG member and a discount code for £90 off the ticket price for everyone else. The tickets were be raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Friday 13th November. Thanks Beyond organisers!
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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
News reporters are trained in techniques to produce stories that are concise,
well structured, easy to follow and with a consistent house style. How can
those same techniques help us write better code?
Why should we care about using immutable objects in our code? What does
functional programming have to do with immutability? How do we approach
immutability when the frameworks and libraries we use seem to go a different
direction?
We'll try to answer these questions by looking at the ideas behind the
implementation of some immutable data structure.
However good the underlying tech, ugly applications discourage users, pretty
ones will attract them. A gulf exists between the artists and the technicians
who need to bring those designs to life. Co-presented by a graphic designer
and a developer, we’ll discuss our approach to keeping both artists and
technicians within their comfort zone to create applications that work well
AND look good.
When the talks end we head over to a local pub to grab some food, a drink, and discuss the talks we've just seen and other goings-on in the Ruby community. The pub is:
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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
A quick blast through encountering a feature with performance in the
mustache gem. How we debugged it and how we fixed it. This talk will be
a bit less boring than it sounds.
What would you build on top of your bank if it had a REST API & Webhooks? At Mondo, we're looking forward to finding out. Our API (plus Ruby client library) is in beta (docs here), and we hosted our first hackathon a couple of weeks ago. Come along to find out what people built!
We aim to finish the talks no later than 8pm, which gives us an ETA of about 8:10 at the pub. If you can't make the talks please do join us afterwards for food, drinks and ruby chat.
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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
As part of my 20% project at GDS, I developed a Slackbot that reminds
developers of their team's pull requests that are awaiting review. I
will talk about why and how the seal
was built, and what I learned from building it.
In this talk we explore how to use docker containers to run ruby on
rails applications. Rails applications usually require several
different components such as Nginx, Redis, MySQL, Mongo and background
jobs. We will show how to set up and manage the configuration of these
elements.
In this talk I will outline some of the ways that teams react to the
mistakes they make and how blameless reviews can help teams learn from
these mistakes
The organisers of All Your Base, a data and databases conference in London on 13th November, have provided free tickets for 5 lucky LRUG memebers and a 15% discount code for everyone else. The tickets will be raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Friday 4th September. Thanks All Your Base organisers!
The nice folk at Braintree Payments got in touch to provide us with two 1-day passes for FOWA London 2015, a web and frontend conference in London on 5-7th October. They also provided a 20% discount code for those too unlucky to win one of the passes. The tickets will be raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Monday 14th September. Thanks Braintree Payments!
After the talks we continue the meeting at a nearby pub. We're still trying out the local pubs to see which one will suit us the best. This time we're going to try out Singer Tavern:
Our talks should end at about 8pm, so if you are unable to attend those you can still join us afterwards in the pub.
Not content with providing the tickets for FOWA, the extremely nice folk at Braintree Payments have also arranged to put some money behind the bar after the meeting. Thanks again Braintree Payments!
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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
Ruby’s billed as a “multi-paradigm” language, but, let’s face it, we
use it to write imperative object-oriented programs. I'm interested in
different ways of programming computers, because I reckon imperative
programs are far too low-level and overspecified, which is why as a
species we're generally terrible at writing them. In this talk I want
to encourage you to think outside of your normal programming habits;
I’ll present a more abstract and declarative style called relational
programming, and show you how to implement a minimal relational
language in Ruby. (Dog whistle: this is μkanren.)
Every day, we write software that solves business problems. How we
actually do that is largely up to us. We tend to build models that
encapsulate complexity and provide abstractions that help us reason
about the problems we solve.
We stress our models with incremental development. Changing business
requirements challenge the durability of our models. The magnitude of
change is an indicator for the effectiveness of our models' ability to
represent the problem domain.
At Which? we used Domain Driven
Design to deliver
our most recent project. In this talk, I will share those insights. I
aim to cut through the jargon and give concrete, real-world examples of
how we applied the principles of DDD to build a product that
anticipates change.
The organisers of container.camp, a conference about software virtualization to be held in London on 11th September, were kind enough to get in touch and provide a free ticket to their conference and a discount code for everyone. The ticket was raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Friday 7th August. Thanks container.camp organisers!
The talks will end at 8pm and we'll head to a local pub. As it's a new venue we don't know which one will best accomodate us so we're going to try out Finch's Pub:
If you can't make the talks then we'll be there from about 8pm; feel free to join us.
The nice folk at thoughtbot, have agreed to put some money behind the bar. Chad Pytel will be in attendance so do seek him out to thank him for buying your drink (and to find out what thoughtbot are up to in London). Thanks thoughtbot for supporting us!
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 us you wish to attend. It's just for the lols, innit?
At Makers Academy we coach students through the process of learning
Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, JavaScript, JQuery and Angular over the course of
12 weeks. Students range in age from 18 to 60, although the majority
are in their late 20s or early 30s, already have university degrees
(often a humanities subject) and have spent 5+ years in the workplace
doing sales, marketing, design, management or some other relatively
non-technical role. The majority of students have also had almost no
programming experience prior to their preparation for the interview and
selection process that they must go through to get on the course. In
this talk I will explore what makes a 12 week intensive bootcamp tick,
and the particular challenges the students face with learning Ruby and
JavaScript.
One of the main purposes of testing is to enable us to trust the
performance of our code in an automated way. Unfortunately, several
problems often arise with automated tests. One common and particularly
annoying problem that we began experiencing in our codebase was
flakiness.
In this talk, I will discuss common problems that may cause this issue,
and some solutions we discovered based on our own experience at
SimplyBusiness.
The talks will end at 8pm and we'll head to The Fellow shortly after. We've reserved the entire first floor, so if you can't make the talks but want to hang out with some rubyists afterwards, head on over and climb the stairs to say "hi".
Chad Pytel from thoughtbot was kind enough to put some money behind the bar at The Fellow. Thanks to him and thoughtbot for supporting us!
To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister via our Eventbrite page or via the embedded ticket widget below. The venue has a capacity of 100 people and we'll have to be strict about registrations. Eventbrite lets you fully manage your ticket, so if you realise you can't go please return the ticket and let someone else attend in your place.
There are very few things that are part of my go-to toolbox, but Redis
is one of those things. I don't think there's a better, more flexible
piece of infrastructure you can have at your disposal.
I'll cover the very basics of using Redis and general patterns that you
can use within your own systems. I'll also share some concrete examples
of what we've used it for at Cronofy.
As a child, Andrew McDonough loved
magic. One of the best Christmas presents he ever received was a magic
set. As an adult, Andrew prefers to perform magic using Ruby. In this
talk, he will attempt an array of traditional magic tricks, using only
IRB.
All those talks will take us to about 8pm, after which we leave Skills Matter's offices and head over to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the meeting. While we ask you to register for the talks, there's no need to do so for this pub part; feel free to turn up even if you don't make it for the talks.
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?
This is the story of a company that survived a much needed
transformation of its product and codebase, but most importantly, of
its culture. There's no real prescription for being agile. It's about
the journey a team takes to discover how to best work together and
deliver great products.
In this presentation, I'll share a candid view of a team trying to
overcome a slow product development process. How we refactored our way
out of badly coupled code, moved to continuous deployment, and greatly
improved our approach to product and software development.
The nice people at Infinitium Global have arranged to make 20 copies of David A. Black's "The Well Grounded Rubyist 2nd Edition" available to LRUG members and we'll be handing them out at this meeting. We used our mailing list to allocate each book to a lucky LRUG member on a first-come, first-served basis. Infinitium are hoping to make this a regular event, so if you'd like to be in with a chance of getting your hands on a book in the future you should sign up to our mailing list.
Our talks usually end at about 8pm after which many members can be found at The Slaughtered Lamb chatting about what they just learned and other goings-on in the ruby world. The pub is large and has a good menu of food and drinks (alcoholic and non) so all are welcome, even if you were unable to attend the talks.
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?
Most developers are familiar with the basics of AI: how do you make a
computer, an algorithm, a system learn something? What most don't
realize though is that the same principles are applied to people. This
talk looks at the theory behind how people learn, and maps it to real
life examples of how specifically developers learn.
Emily Stolfo is visiting from Berlin to tell us all about writing the new ruby driver for MongoDB:
The Ruby team at MongoDB spent the last year building a new driver
– the mongo gem –
that was released a few weeks ago. Emily is going to talk about how
they built the driver, its design, and why its availability is
so exciting for the Rails and Ruby community.
For reference, an article announcing the release: shar.es/1g0PFK
MongoDB 3.0 was also released a few weeks ago and she'll talk a bit
about what makes this version so monumental and why you should try
it out.
The formal talks-and-speakers-based part of the meeting ends around 8pm, after which we make the short trip to The Slaughtered Lamb to continue the event. Most of the attendees and speakers are usually here so it's a great chance to find out what's going on in the LRUG community, or to catch up with or make some new friends. Attendance of the talks is not a prerequisite for coming to the pub, so please 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?
A look at how some "odd syntax" introduced in Rails 1.1 and
then added to Ruby itself might not solely be for the sake of
convenience but hint at a more powerful idea seen in other
programming languages.
In the life of every* project there is
this moment where standard deployment methods just don’t cut
it. You have many servers, many applications, many developers.
It can become a mess very, very quickly.
Have you ever dreamed of hosting your own apt repository? When
was the last time you were annoyed about slow deployment times
because the asset pipeline needs to run every single server
your app runs on? Oh and lets not mention installing ruby
version managers on servers, ok? (I will though).
In this talk I will show how packaging (and deploying) Ruby
applications doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming and can
work with a project of any size.
The nice people at Braintree Payments have arranged to buy some pizza for us to eat during the talks. The Pizza will be there from about 6pm so turn up early if you're hungry! There'll be a selection to suit most tastes: meat-eaters, vegetarian, and vegan. We're not sure if the pizza company does a gluten-free option, but we'll get one if they do.
The talks end at 8pm and I'm sure all that talking and pizza will have given us a bit of a thirst. The evening continues at The Slaughtered Lamb which is a 5 minute walk from the Skills Matter office. It's a great opportunity to talk to the speakers in question, or just catch up with some other London rubyists. If you're unable to attend the talks please feel free to attend the pub only.
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?
Thanks to the nice folks at Team Prime and Bath Ruby we are able to provide 4 people with free tickets and a £70 allowance (enough to cover return train travel from London). The tickets are available to LRUG members that wouldn't otherwise be able to attend. The deadline to put your name forward for a ticket is midnight on Sunday 8th, February 2014. If more than 4 people request the tickets a draw will be held privately to select the winners. The recipients of the tickets will not be publicly announced, but we'll thank Team Prime and the Bath Ruby Conf organisers at the start of the meeting.
All those talks are bound to generate some thoughts we'd like to discuss afterwards. So we cross Goswell Road and head down to The Slaughtered Lamb to have those discussions in a more informal setting. If you didn't make it for the talks then do feel free to turn up just for this 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?
Many Rails codebases I look at work hard to put all logic into
the application source code, using the database only a dumb
store. But, there are circumstances where it makes sense to
leverage features of a database and in this talk I'll cover one
of those features in Views. I'll walk through examples of why you
might want logic in two places, how views compare to caching
for performance considerations, using views as a facade on
legacy tables and how to test views alongside your application.
WebRTC is an exciting technology currently in, or coming
soon to a browser near you. In this talk I will explain what
it is, how it works and how to setup some ruby services to
support a WebRTC-based application.
After the speakers are done it's time for the rest of us to give our vocal chords a workout. We have to leave Skills Matter by 8pm so we head to The Slaughtered Lamb to do so. If you can't make the talks then do feel free to attend this part. There's no need to register for this bit though, so just turn up!
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?
