A/B tests are simple: you have a change you want to make; you define what
"conversion" is; you randomly show the change to half your users, and see
if "conversion" goes up or down with the change. But what if the effects
are more complex?
I'll talk about an experiment we ran that initially targeted a single
measure of conversion but had some knock-on effects, and how we were able
to study them. I'll share some very easy things you can do right away to
get more information out of your A/B tests, and hopefully convince you
there's more to them than deciding on some copy, or the colour of a button.
These talks should bring us up to about 8pm. The meeting doesn't end there
though, if you've a mind to keep things going you have a choice:
Stay at Code Node. Skills Matter have a cash bar with a
choice of drinks on offer. There are other meetups hosted by Skills Matter
on the same night so you can mingle with attendees of those events to find
out what's happening in those communities.
Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.
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 good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.
The November 2016 meeting of LRUG will be on Tuesday the 15th of November, from
6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). Please note that this meeting does
not conform to our usual schedule and is being held on a Tuesday.
Every line of code has cost associated with it. The cost of writing it. The
cost of testing it. Deploying it. Reading it. Changing it later. I'd like to
identify some of the costs and suggest ways of reducing them. Hint: write
less code in the first place.
Elastic Beanstalk (EB) is a product from AWS that is trying to provide easy
to setup load balanced environment of EC2 instances.
In this talk we will configure simple Rails app, wrap it in a Docker container
and ship it to AWS EB setup. We will look at some awesome configuration
options.
While Rails provides us a great platform for rapid application development
it doesn't give us much guidance on where to start placing common
abstractions once our domain complexity grows. This talk isn't about the
'architecture astronaut' or fighting rails to implement 'better' patterns,
it's a really basic intro to some of the layers you can implement tomorrow
to compartmentalise your code without having to fight the framework.
The nice people at Cogent have arranged to provide us
with some pizza and drinks. These will be available before the meeting in
the Skilss Matter downstairs bar area, so there's even more reasons to turn
up early. Cogent are a software agency in Melbourne, Australia, and are
looking to hire ruby devs, if you're interested they'll help you relocate.
The talks part of the meeting ends around 8:00pm. If you'd like to continue the
evening you have a choice of where to go next:
The downstairs area at Code Node. Skills Matter have a cash bar with a
choice of drinks on offer. There are other meetups hosted by Skills Matter
on the same night so you can mingle with attendees of those events to find
out what's happening in those communities.
Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.
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 good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd,
but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly
use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos,
slides, writeups, code, etc.
Charlie Egan has some tips for developers
using docker and bundler:
For almost a year I've enjoyed using Docker and docker-compose to work on
various Ruby projects. However - bundle installations when building images
have been always been painful. This talk is about exploring the rather
unsatisfactory options available to speed up the process of "development
re-bundling".
Chris Radford is going to tell us how to
make i18n a smooth process:
Translating websites has been A Thing(tm) since the earliest days of the
web, so how does it take over a month to translate a website with less
than a dozen pages? In this talk Chris walks us through the minefield of
internationalisation and some of the common pitfalls of translating a
website.
Joining the mob: Top 12 mob programming tips and thoughts #
Emma Beynon wants to share how she and
her team got on with mob-programming:
What happens when you get 5 developers to work on the same problem on the
same computer at the same time? Emma's team at GDS took collaboration to
the next level by trying out mob programming. Find out what they learned
from their mobbing experience, and take away a few tips to try it in your
team.
Our talks will be done by 8:45pm after which you can find LRUG attendees in one
of these venues:
The downstairs area at Code Node. Skills Matter have a cash bar with a
choice of drinks on offer. If there are other meetups on the same night
you can hang out with those attendees too and find out what's going on in
other technology communities.
The Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road,
EC1Y 1AG). For those who want to eat as well
as drink after the talks, you'll find many LRUG attendees here. There's
a wide selection of drinks, and some tasty food on offer too.
Attendance of the talks isn't a requirement for coming along to the afterwards
part. Do turn up and say "hi!", you'll be more than welcome.
Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks, or afterwards in the pub.
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 good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd,
but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly
use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos,
slides, writeups, code, etc.
Josh Hill wants to share his experiences with pair-programming:
Josh heard about pair programming a few years ago and tried it a few
times. Last year, he jumped in and started pairing full-time. Working so
closely with clients, colleagues, juniors and seniors was challenging. Now he
enjoys pairing more than flying solo and has seen the benefits for himself
and his teammates. This talk is about the challenges and benefits of working
more closely with one another.
The nice people at Hired
have arranged a giveaway of twenty books to lucky LRUG members. The winners
will be able to choose one of the following books as their prize:
If you'd like the chance to be one of twenty winners visit this online form
and enter your name, email address, and choice of book. The form opens in the
evening of Monday, 13th September and will be open until 1pm on Tuesday, 20th
September 2016.
The meeting will finish around about 8pm when the prepared talks are over. It's now up to you and the other attendees to have unprepared talks in the comfort of one of these venues:
The downstairs area at Code Node. Skills Matter have a cash bar with a choice of drinks on offer. If there are other meetups on the same night you can hang out with those attendees too and find out what's going on in other technology communities.
The Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). For those who want to eat as well as drink after the talks, you'll find many LRUG attendees here. There's a wide selection of drinks, and some tasty food on offer too.
If you are unable to attend the talks you don't need to miss out, you can absolutely come along to meet us 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 good manners, so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos, slides, writeups, code, etc.
Jairo Diaz is going to tell us about the newest addition to rails:
Action Cable is a
Rails framework for real-time communication over websockets introduced in
Rails 5.0. With Action Cable we can develop interactive applications and live
notifications to our users.
Forget ninja developers and rockstar developers. What I'm more interested in
is the superhero developer: these are the developers that do their best to
help others, that try to give back to their community, and generally make the
world a better place.
So how can we all strive to be superhero developers? Using the origin stories
and lessons from Marvel superheroes, this talk will help you become the type
of developer that amplifies and helps others.
We'll be done with the talks by about 8pm. If you'd like to continue talking to your fellow LRUG attendees about the topics brought up by the speakers, goings on in the ruby community at large, or anything else you have a choice to make. You can:
Hang out in the downstairs area at Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar and you can mingle with attendees of other meetups held that night.
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 good manners, so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos, slides, writeups, code, etc.
As always, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t found time to do the reading. At
the Ruby Book Club, we like to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
In this talk I will provide a short comparison of the popular API
documentation tools available for Ruby. I'll explain how you can use them to
generate API documentation for your own projects.
Edd Sowden is going to tell us all about React and Rails:
Looking at how you can start using React
within a Rails environment, why you might want to, and what benefits it can
unlock. Also looking at how you can make this change to a large project which
lots of developers contribute to regularly.
The talks will end by 8pm, but that's not the end of the LRUG meeting. There are a couple of options for how to continue your evening with other LRUG attendees. You can:
Hang out in the downstairs area at Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar and you can mingle with attendees of other meetups held that night.
Take a short walk northwards and visit the Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). Many LRUG folk head here to get something to eat with their post-talk drinks, and you'd be more than welcome to join them.
All are welcome at this post-talk part of the meeting where no registration is required. Feel free to turn up just for this part if you can't make it to 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 good manners, so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos, slides, writeups, code, etc.
There are limits to our ability to learn and process
information. Overload impacts productivity by causing psychological
and physiological stress. I’ll relate findings from cognitive
psychology that help us understand how, as developers, we might be
overloading ourselves and what to do about it.
12 months ago we were facing a number of problems familiar in an early
stage startup:
a monolithic codebase that had accumulated a lot of technical debt
a requirement to handle complex business processes that were changing
quickly as the business scaled
a growing development team struggling to enable new hires to be effective
quickly
We initially considered moving to a micro-service architecture but eventually
settled on using rails engines to refactor our monolith, allowing us to make
immediate gains in productivity whilst avoiding the operational complexity of
a distributed system. The talk will cover the approach we are taking in this
(ongoing) refactor, the rules we found we needed to play by, and the lessons
we learned along the way.
These talks will end by 8pm which is quite early, so if you'd like to continue
the evening in the company of other LRUG folk you can:
Hang out in the downstairs area at Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar and you can mingle with attendees of other meetups held that night.
Take a short walk northwards and visit the Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). Many LRUG folk head here to get something to eat with their post-talk drinks, and you'd be more than welcome to join them.
Attendance of the talks isn't required if you'd like to come along just for this part of the meeting. Perhaps if you're unable to make the talks you can secure a table for 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 good manners, so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos, slides, writeups, code, etc.
Most of us do some form of code review, increasingly often through pull
requests. Done well it can be a great tool for improving quality, sharing
knowledge, and building a sense of cohesion in a team. Done badly it can be
toxic. In this talk I’d like to look at the motivations for code review,
examine research into its value, and suggest some practices on how to do it
well.
Imagine some of the worst things that could happen to you during cap deploy
– well, they happened to Ali on the same day, and it turned into one of the
worst days of his life. Interestingly, Sally in the office across the street
had the exact same issues come up during her deployment. However her team had
invested in their infrastructure sensibly, and deployed fresh immutable
server clusters from pre-built machine images on each deploy. She could just
relax, as the infrastructure had been designed to filter out most problems
that could occur during deployment. Here is their story!
Bit Zesty have been playing with Docker to help with Dev/Prod parity, but
deploying and managing Docker images in production has been a pain. Convox
helps by providing a simple Heroku-esque CLI to deploy and manage your
application on AWS. We've been able to replace a bunch of terraform +
chef/ansible scripts and use Docker in production without the headache.
The nice people at Pusher have provided 5 tickets for Brighton Ruby conference, a one day, single track, conference for Rubyists & the Ruby-curious in Brighton on 8th July. The tickets were raffled off on our mailing list with the winners contacted on Thursdayday 5th May. Thanks Pusher!
We should be done with the talks by 8pm at which point have a choice to make:
Stay at Code Node where Skills Matter have a cash bar and you can mingle with attendees of other meetups held that night.
Head over to the Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG) where you'll find a wide selection of food and drinks to choose from and a bunch of LRUG members to chat with.
If you're unable to attend the talks it's more than acceptable to come along to one of these venues to hang out with the rest of the LRUG members.
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 good manners, so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos, slides, writeups, code, etc.
Dr Chris Seaton is building a new ruby interpreter and wants to tell us all about it:
JRuby+Truffle is a new Ruby interpreter from Oracle Labs. While it uses
cutting-edge compiler technology to achieve high performance, the concepts
and implementation of most of JRuby+Truffle are actually rather simple -
simpler than MRI, JRuby or Rubinius, and needing only techniques that can be
explained in a few slides.
Jonny Arnold is going to tell us about some agile practices:
Reevoo is already an Agile company: we have JIRA Agile, so we must be, right?
A few months ago we set out on a greenfield project, and decided to do things
differently. What would happen when we went back to sticky notes and
whiteboards for planning? Could we deliver on time for a project if we never
set a deadline? And what happens when half of the development team changes
every two weeks? Come along to our public retrospective on what went well and
what we would never do again.
These talks should end around about 8pm. The night isn't over at that point though; many other attendees will be hanging around and it's a good chance to chat about things raised in the talks, or just to meet up with other rubyists and discuss what's been going on in the ruby scene. If you'd like to continue chatting to other attendees you have a choice:
Stay at Code Node where Skills Matter have a cash bar and you can mingle with attendees of other meetups held that night.
Head over to the Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG) where you can get some food to chew over along with the discussions spurred by the talks.
Even if you can't make the talks you should definitely feel free to head over to one of these venues to hang out.
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 good manners, so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos, slides, writeups, code, etc.
The Elixir programming language has been generating
a lot of buzz in the Ruby community recently. This presentation gives an
introduction to Elixir, discussing some of the things that make it so popular
among rubyists, and outlining a few of the similarities and differences
between Elixir and Ruby.
The vast majority of projects use Redis like it's Memcached, but Redis can
give so much more. In this talk I'll give practical examples of use cases
where Redis outshines everything else I've tried.
We aim to finish the talks by 8pm, but that's not where the meeting ends. If you'd like to continue chatting to other attendees you have a choice:
Stay at Code Node where Skills Matter have a cash bar and you can mingle with attendees of other meetups held that night.
Head over to the Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG) where you can get some food to chew over along with the discussions spurred by the talks.
Attendance at the talks isn't required to come along for the socialising part of the meeting, so please do head over if you can't make the earlier part.
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 good manners, so please do register with Skills Matter.
You can also find this meeting on lanyrd, but this is not a meaningful way to tell us you wish to attend. We mostly use it after the meeting to collect artefacts about the talks like videos, slides, writeups, code, etc.
Your First PR is an initiative with a goal to get people involved in making
pull requests to other open source projects. In this talk you will be
introduced to Your First PR as a project, discover where you can find
starter issues to work on, and learn how you can help others to make their
own awesome pull requests.
Often when we talk about imposter syndrome in developers, we look at what
the individual can do to stop it from happening. In this talk, I'll look
at what we can do as a team.
All useful software is applied to a particular problem domain. This talk
will encourage the use of value objects to better model a programs problem
domain.
Tom Cartwright - "Psychology of programming: A very short introduction" #
The psychology of programming is field of research that deals with the
psychological aspects of writing computer programs. (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_programming. This is a short
introduction to the subject with a précis of the current research and few
reckons thrown in for good measure.
Tom Stuart - "Automatic differentiation in Ruby" #
Finding the derivative of a mathematical function on a computer can be
difficult, but there’s a clever trick that makes it easy: first write a
program that computes the function, then execute it under a non-standard
interpretation of its values and operations. In this talk I’ll show you how
that works in Ruby.
There's bound to be something to talk about after all those talks and we now have two options for winding down the evening and chatting to other LRUG attendees:
Stay at Code Node where Skills Matter have a cash bar and you can mingle with attendees of other meetups held that night.
Take the short walk to the Singer Tavern (located at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG) where you can get some food to chew over along with the discussions spurred by the talks.
Talks should finish at about 8pm so if you can't make it along earlier feel free to come along to either venue afterwards to hang out.
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?
Recruitment is a pain, isn't it? Does it have to be this way? We say
'no' and we want to show you why. Primed.is a web application to
tackle common recruitment problems and we can't wait to tell you all
about it.
Then Jake will talk to us about his journey while building it:
A Guide to Becoming a Ruby on Rails Developer
After working as a Flash developer and team lead for 10 years I have
switched to become a Ruby on Rails developer to build our new product,
Primed. This is the talk I would like to have heard a year ago when I
was beginning that journey.
direnv is a language-agnostic environment switching tool
that I wrote a 5 years ago and still use every day.
This talk is going to present the tool and it's capabilities, and then explore
how it can be used by ruby developers. Hopefully it will be useful to you in
the everyday life as a developer, or just spark some interesting
conversations.
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?
