2018 Meetings

December 2018 Meeting

The December 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of December, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

The Case of the Missing Method — A Ruby Mystery Story

Nadia Odunayo:

Business is slow for Ruby Private Investigator, Deirdre Bug. She’s on the verge of switching industry when she gets a call from an anxious young man. "Some class methods have gone missing," he tells her breathlessly. "I need your help."

Deirdre takes the case and begins exploring Ruby objects behind the scenes. Though she thinks she's on familiar ground — Ruby's object model, method lookup — she's about to discover that she really has no clue.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : The Case of the Missing Method — A Ruby Mystery Story

The problem with compiling Ruby

Vidar Hokstad:

To get maximum performance out of a language, compilation is key, and people > have been trying to compile Ruby for a long time, ranging from jRuby and Truffle Ruby to the experimental method JIT in Ruby 2.6. But Ruby is a very challenging language to compile efficiently. The talk will explore some of the reasons based on what I've learned while working on my own Ruby compiler as described in my series of blog posts at http://hokstad.com/compiler

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : The Problem with Compiling Ruby

Pro Capybara Herding: Feature Testing Tips

Oli Peate:

How do I debug JavaScript during a test? And how about emulating mobile devices? More importantly how do I mute this video I need to test?! Learn about these topics and more in this lightning talk about testing with Capybara & Chrome

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Pro Capybara Herding: Feature Testing Tips

Afterwards

We aim to finish up the talks by 8pm. This doesn't mean you have to go home though, if you're keen to talk about what you've just heard, or just mingle with your fellow attendees you have a couple of choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Chris Lowis on Nov 26, 2018

November 2018 Meeting

The November 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of November, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Open Banking - From Scraping to APIs

Toby Pinder:

Banking is changing, and so is the way we interact with financial services. In this talk we’ll be touching on what Open Banking is and why it’s interesting to software developers. Then we'll launch ourselves into some of the APIs from a rubyist perspective and the real world experiences and challenges of working in a complex ecosystem that contains both established banking institutions and fintech startups.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Open Banking - From Scraping to APIs

Ruby HomeKit

Karl Entwistle:

A lightning talk about how I implemented the HomeKit Accessory Protocol in Ruby. A set of protocols and libraries to access devices for home automation on iOS.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Automate Your Home with Ruby

Most valuable employee traits from a business owner perspective

Piotr Nowak:

What comes to mind when thinking about tech employee position and progression? What are the most valuable traits from the perspective of business itself as well as personal development at the current position as well as for the future ones? This talk will give insight on the business side of the employer-employee relationship.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Most Valuable Employee Traits from a Business Owner Perspective

Food!

GitHub

The nice people at GitHub have sponsored this meeting by buying some pizza for us to eat. It'll be laid out downstairs in the Skills Matter bar area and there will options for vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free diets. It'll be available from about 6 and will last until it's all been eaten. There should be plenty, but turn up early if you want to make sure you get some.

Thanks again to GitHub for supporting us!

Afterwards

We aim to finish up the talks by 8pm. This doesn't mean you have to go home though, if you're keen to talk about what you've just heard, or just mingle with your fellow attendees you have a couple of choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Ella Schofield on Oct 24, 2018

October 2018 Meeting

The October 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Tuesday the 9th of October, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

We've got three great talks for you in October:

Unicode Spaß

Leif Gensert

How do programming languages deal with the rules of languages? And what happens if these rules change?

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Unicode Spaß

hubbaDDDo

Stanisław Klajn

Hubbado is an online, community-driven job marketplace. We'd like to share how we explore our domain of job-matching and use the resulting domain knowledge to improve our system design. We will also cover some techniques of extracting domain logic within existing Rails application using Trailblazer and service objects as well as some patterns we are trying out to reduce coupling in relatively large application like CQRS with Event Sourcing.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : hubbaDDDo

Interface incantations

Jo Pearce

According to the witches of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, most magic is simply headology. This talk will mix literary references and outline the headology of interface design, from basic charms and illusions that fool and entice us to the unforgivable curses that can shape our thinking and behaviour.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Interface incantations

Afterwards

We should be done with the talks by 8pm, but there's bound to be plenty to talk about after these so if you want to chat to your fellow attendees or the speakers afterwards you have a couple of choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by James Adam on Oct 01, 2018

September 2018 Meeting

The September 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Tuesday the 11th of September, from 6:00pm to 8:30pm (talks start at 7:00pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

We've got three great talks for you in September:

How to scrape dynamic web pages using Ruby

Piotr Jaworski says:

In the talk, I'll show to scrape dynamic web pages - how to deal with a content which is loaded async and how to write a scraper which is able to do everything in the background processor.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : How to scrape dynamic web pages using Ruby

How to spend more time writing features and less time managing servers thanks to the modern cloud

Asfand Yar Qazi

The cloud has evolved from just a few services like virtual machines to offering so much more. Asfand will discuss how these amazing new services can be used to support and enhance web apps written in frameworks like Rails, allowing us to reap the benefits of the modern cloud while delegating lots of laborious infrastructure management away to the cloud providers themselves.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : How to spend more time writing features and less time managing servers thanks to the modern cloud

Tune up your system with Materialized Views

Joaquim Adráz

Complex SQL queries are inevitable when building a system. However getting results from a complex SQL query doesn’t need to be a slow process and in this talk I’ll show you how you can speed it up using Materialized Views.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Tune up your system with Materialized Views

Afterwards

We should be done with the talks by 8pm, but there's bound to be plenty to talk about after these so if you want to chat to your fellow attendees or the speakers afterwards you have a couple of choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Tatiana Stantonian on Aug 24, 2018

August 2018 Meeting

The August 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of August, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

We've got three great talks for you in August:

The Fast and The Furriest - Performance refactoring with bunnies

Sroop Sunar says:

I’ve been a developer for several years and throughout my career I’ve learned how to write clean, well-tested code. I’ve also discovered that sometimes writing the most beautiful poetic code can be horrendously slow when working with lots of data. What I really want is fast code. I know the topic of performance can seem intimidating at first - don’t worry I am by no means an expert in performance either! My talk isn't about compiler optimisation, multithreading, profilers, buffer management or cyclomatic complexity. In fact, what I’ve found is that optimising code doesn’t need to be more complicated than good old fashioned refactoring. Using a real problem that I encountered, my talk will take you through how I made slow code fast. Oh, and bunnies. Lots and lots of bunnies.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : The Fast and The Furriest - Performance refactoring with bunnies

Data-driven dependency management

Grey Baker

How buggy / insecure are new gem releases? Analysis of 10 years of Rubysec data and 50,000 dependency updates PRs.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Data-Driven Dependency Management

Logic Programming with Ruby and Z3

Tomasz Wegrzanowski

A lot of real problems can be described by a collection of mathematical equations. From sudoku to dependency resolution to verifying correctness of processors and cryptographic protocols. Z3 is a very powerful solver for such problems, and an elegant Ruby DSL is a great interface to it.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Logic Programming with Ruby and Z3

Afterwards

We should be done with the talks by 8pm, but there's bound to be plenty to talk about after these so if you want to chat to your fellow attendees or the speakers afterwards you have a couple of choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by James Adam on Aug 06, 2018

July 2018 Meeting

The July 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of July, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Our July meeting has three fantastic talks:

Write better tests with property based testing

Suzanne Hamilton says:

We write automated tests to give us confidence in our code, but bugs still fall between the cracks. In this talk I'll show you how to apply the techniques of property-based testing to use randomly-generated data to drive out more bugs with fewer tests. I'll demonstrate these techniques using the new Hypothesis for Ruby library which is based on the popular Hypothesis Python library.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Write Better Tests With Property Based Testing

CSS Shapes: upgrade your page layouts

Nicky Thompson says:

Web design is getting boring. We're not learning enough from our history, and so we're doomed to repeat our mistakes. You won't get your message across effectively if your website looks like all the other websites out there.

This talk will cover some of that history in an attempt to help us all learn from it. You'll also learn some cool new ways CSS can help you stand out, after which you will be armed with practical help to use these techniques, the knowledge of when to use them (and when not to), and arguments to help convince your colleagues of your great new ideas.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : CSS Shapes: Upgrade Your Page Layouts

As You Like It - if Shakespeare had written Functions as a Service

Ewan Slater says:

In this talk I'll be covering:

  • What is FaaS
  • The Fn project - an open source agnostic FaaS platform
  • The Ruby FDK (Function Development Kit)
  • With a bit of inspiration from William Shakespeare.
  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : As You Like It - If Shakespeare Had Written Functions as a Service

Food and Drinks

thoughtbot

The nice people at thoughtbot are sponsoring this meeting by making some pizza and drinks available. These will be made available before the meeting downstairs in the Skills Matter bar area. There should be pizza suitable for vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free diets and the drinks will be the full range from the Skills Matter bar, including alcoholic and soft options.

Thanks, thoughtbot, for supporting us!

Afterwards

The talks will have finished by 8pm. After that, though, you’ll probably have loads to talk about. If you'd like to chat to the speakers or other attendees about the talks, or anything else Ruby-adjacent, you have the following choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Please remember that our code of conduct still applies to this more informal part of the meeting.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Tom Stuart on Jun 28, 2018

June 2018 Meeting

The June 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 18th of June, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Our June meeting has two talks and a prize draw!

How to grow a small development team

Najaf Ali says:

This talk is about how we grew the team at Happy Bear Software. In this talk I'll discuss:

  • How working at a given company fits into a developer's career
  • Finding candidates
  • Selection
  • On-boarding
  • Retention
  • What to do when people leave your team

Much of how we hire is specific to our business and our goals, but there will hopefully be two or three techniques, practices, or principles that you can apply to your hiring process.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : How to Grow a Small Development Team

Breaking into computers over the Internet

David Somers wants to tell us how to protect the software you build:

I’ll start by talking briefly about the protocols computers use to communicate. Then I'll discuss how they can be abused by demoing some of the tools and techniques security professionals (and hackers) use to scan and infiltrate servers. If the demo gods are on my side, I’ll break in to a vulnerable system or two to show you how easy it is for people to exploit known vulnerabilities in software you, as a software developer, may be responsible for keeping up to date. Then finally I'll cover some ways to protect the software you write from those types of attacks.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Breaking into Computers Over the Internet

Brighton Ruby ticket prizedraw

Streetbees

The kind people at Streetbees, an Artificial Intelligence based Market Research platform bolstered by powerful community building tools, have bought us a couple of tickets to the Brighton Ruby conference on Friday, 6th July 2018. We'll be running a prize draw at this meeting; if you attend on the night your name will be entered in the giveaway and the winning names will be drawn from a hat*.

Thanks streetbees!

* We may not use an actual hat.

Afterwards

Our talks will finish by 8pm, but that doesn't have to be the end of the evening for you. If you'd like to talk to the speakers, or to other attendees about the talks, or other goings on in the ruby community you have a couple of options:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Murray Steele on May 14, 2018

May 2018 Meeting

The May 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 9th of May, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

We've got three great talks for you in May:

Software Development – a view from the Boardroom

Alan Buxton says:

Chances are you are building software for a business to use or sell, or both. It’s likely that there is a board of directors involved making decisions that affect you and your software. This talk aims to give you a personal insight into what it’s like to be a CTO on a startup’s board in the hope that it gives you another perspective on ‘the business’ and helps you become a more rounded developer.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Software Development – a view from the Boardroom

An Introduction to Event Sourcing

Alfredo Motta

Event sourcing is a recently developed design pattern to build applications that are domain centric and easy to extend. The pattern is based on the usage of a persistent event log which substitutes the more classical relational database model for Rails applications. Such event log can then be used for extending your application in all sort of creative ways. For example, by synchronizing data between your microservices, trigger side effects without cluttering your models or controllers, or build data views optimized for your query needs. In this talk, I'll present the basic ideas, some of the tradeoffs and challenges you might find and how you could start experimenting with it.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : An Introduction to Event Sourcing

On Writing <%= code %>

Elliot Hilaire

Writing code in high-level programming languages began in the 1950s. In contrast, writing goes back more than 5000 years. So, what can we learn from people who study writing? This talk explores concepts from three books about writing and applies them to coding.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : On writing <%= code %>

Afterwards

We should be done with the talks by 8pm, but there's bound to be plenty to talk about after these so if you want to chat to your fellow attendees or the speakers afterwards you have a couple of choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by James Adam on Apr 24, 2018

April 2018 Meeting

The April 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of April, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

You’re doing documentation wrong (and so am I)

Scott Matthewman says:

As developers, we’re always asked to write more documentation. Some of us even do it without being asked. But look around the web and you’ll see countless gems, applications and source code examples whose documentation is either missing or makes no sense. How can we make little changes to the way we think about documentation to make things better?

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : You’re doing documentation wrong (and so am I)

Sliding Puzzles

Chris Patuzzo says:

Did you ever play with one of those cheap plastic-y tile puzzles as a child? Let's try to solve them with Ruby and use that as an excuse to talk about combinatorics, complexity theory and proof.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Sliding Puzzles

Scaling millions of jobs with Enumerators

Kir Shatrov says:

Enumerator is a pattern that not too many developers are often exposed to, despite the fact that it comes with Ruby and is leveraged in many libraries that we use every day (Rails). Join the talk to learn how we’ve used Enumerators to scale millions of background jobs at Shopify and how it influenced the way developers think when writing resilient code.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Scaling Millions of Jobs with Enumerators

Drinks Sponsor

Explore

The nice people at The Explore Group have arranged to provide us with drinks. They have arranged to put some money behind the bar after the meeting in the Skills Matter downstairs bar area.

The Explore Group has been helping companies recruit top talent in the ever-evolving world of technology since 2005. They're keen to speak with Ruby on Rails developers looking for their next challenge.

Thanks for supporting us The Explore Group!

Afterwards

Our aim is to finish the talks by 8pm. The night doesn't have to end there though, to continue hanging out with other LRUG attendees you can visit:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosting on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

If you can't attend the talks we'd still be very happy to see you at this part of the meeting. Do come along!

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Murray Steele on Mar 21, 2018

March 2018 Meeting

The March 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of March, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Web Architecture choices & Ruby

Tomas Valent says:

I'll try to talk about most popular web application architecture choices (monolith, micro-service, serverless and their variations) from the perspective of a Ruby developer. When is good to use one over the other and philosophies behind them.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Web Architecture choices & Ruby

Strong opinions, loosely held

Alex Heeton says:

Strong opinions and principles are a great thing to have. In this talk I'll share some of my principles, and show how they've helped me grow teams and build more robust software, with a special focus on managing larger Rails applications.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Strong opinions, loosely held

Make responsive emails super-duper easily with MJML

Chris O’Sullivan says:

If you're like me, you hate making HTML emails that work across email apps and devices. In this lightning talk I'm going to introduce you to MJML - a markup language that takes a lot of pain out of making responsive emails. You can find more information at http://mjml.io.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Make responsive emails super-duper easily with MJML

Afterwards

The talks should be finished by 8pm. If you'd like to socialise with other LRUG attendees afterwards, you have two choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosting on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

If you can't attend the talks we'd still be very happy to see you at this part of the meeting. Do come along!

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Tom Stuart on Feb 21, 2018

February 2018 Meeting

The February 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of February, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (talks start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

In February we devote our whole evening to lightning talks of no more than 10 minutes. This year our talks are:

The Human Cost of Messy Code

Adrian Booth says:

What are the real costs behind a messy codebase? It’s not just about being harder to change and annoying to work with. There are human costs to these decisions we make every day that have implications beyond the codebase.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : The Human Cost of Messy Code

Search Relevancy

Rosa Fox says:

A quick introduction to search result relevancy featuring GOV.UK.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Search Relevancy

_why Symbol#to_proc works and more

Simon George says:

How Symbol#to_proc found its way into Ruby core, who put it there, ways it can be extended, and a crude drawing of a fish.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : _why Symbol#to_proc works and more

Introduction to Active Storage

Dan Kim says:

A brief introduction to Active Storage, a new library for cloud attachments in Rails applications. How to install Active Storage and integrate it with cloud services like Amazon S3. Comparison to the existing file upload solutions.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Introduction to Active Storage

Things I wish I'd known about Ruby Gems

Iain Beeston says:

I want to give a talk that discusses a handful of topics related to rubygems, that might be interesting for devs who haven't published a gem before or don't know how they work. I'd like to discuss what a gem really is, how gem loading works, how to debug errors coming from a gem you're using and how to make your own gem.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Things I wish I'd known about Ruby Gems

Increase your quality of life: An RSpec primer

Elena Tanasoiu says:

If you can’t be arsed to read a book about RSpec, this talk is for you. I’m here to offer you a short but sweet look into Rspec and what it can do. It’s a list of nice to knows, but did you actually know them? Based on “Effective testing with Rspec 3” by Myron Marston and Ian Dees

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Increase Your Quality of Life: An RSpec Primer

Git commit signing: Code we can trust?

Matthew Rudy Jacobs says:

When we install software on our computers we have to trust the package maintainers that it's secure.

If someone slips a hack into homebrew all of our machines could become vulnerable.

But what about our own code? * When we deploy to production, how do we know we can trust it? * What if someone pushes a hack to our github? * Will CI still push it to production?

It turns out Git has a cool feature that can help us trust the code we deploy. We'll discuss Git Commit Signing, how it can help us, and what downsides it may have.

  1. Skills Matter : London Ruby User Group : Git commit signing: Code we can trust?

Afterwards

We should be done with the talks by 8pm, but there's bound to be plenty to talk about after these so if you want to chat to your fellow attendees or the speakers afterwards you have a couple of choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosing on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

Don't worry that you'll miss out on this part if you can't make the talks. Attendance of the talks is far from mandatory to attend the socialising afterwards, so please do come along anyway if you can.

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Murray Steele on Jan 23, 2018

January 2018 Meeting

The January 2018 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of January, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm (meeting start at 6:30pm). The venue, Code Node between Moorgate and Liverpool St. stations, is provided by Skills Matter. Full venue and registration details are given below.

Agenda

Quiz!

Our first meeting of 2018 will be a slightly different kind of thing. Instead of talks there'll be a quiz. We did this in 2007 and 2013 so if you attended those you'll know what to expect. If not the details are below

Format

The quiz will be run as 5 separate rounds. The first four are themed on the words in LRUG (London, Ruby, Users, and Group). The 5th round is a picture round which will be given to each team to complete throughout the evening and marked at the end. The picture round questions will be based around the same 4 themes as the other rounds.

  • Round 1: London
  • Round 2: Ruby (more community and history than technical details)
  • Round 3: Users (famous and historical people)
  • Round 4: Group (music)
  • Round 5: picture round

Each round will have 10 questions, but there'll be bonus points available throughout the quiz for exceptional answers.

Rules

  1. Teams should have no more than 4 members (we may adjust this up or down on the night depending on attendance or prize divisibility).
  2. Utilising internet devices to obtain answers is strictly forbidden - we expect you to use your onboard brain, not your outboard one.
  3. The quiz master's word is final in any disputes.

Prizes

Our lovely sponsors have donated the following:

  1. Copies of “99 Bottles of OOP” by Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen provided by:
    Unboxed

  2. Copies of “Exceptional Ruby” by Avdi Grimm provided by:
    Explore

  3. Parcels of Pact coffee provided by:
    Carwow

  4. 3-month subscriptions to Ruby Tapas provided by:
    Avdi Grimm

We're still looking for more sponsors to provide prizes for the winners. If we have enough prizes some of the runners up will also get prizes. If you can help us out please do get in touch with us at sponsors@lrug.org. Other than the warm glow in your stomach of helping us out the benefits of sponsorship are explained on our readme site.

Afterwards

We aim to finish the quiz by 8pm (although it may over-run depending on how long the marking and prize-giving takes). There's bound to be some heated debate about how cruel the questions were and how your particularly funny ruby pun-based team name was robbed of the best team-name bonus. If you'd like to socialise with other LRUG attendees afterwards you have two choices:

  1. Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are hosting on the same night.
  2. The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y 1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the meeting is still covered by our code of conduct even though it does seem more informal.

If you can't attend the talks we'd still be very happy to see you at this part of the meeting. Do come along!

Venue & Registration

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.

Venue

The address of the venue:

Skills Matter CodeNode
10 South Place
London
EC2M 2RB

See on a map

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you must register 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.

Posted by Murray Steele on Dec 16, 2017