Meetings
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Wednesday the 8th of July, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, this time at a new venue The Crypt (it's very close to the other venues). We still need people to register though to make sure the room is set up properly.
Agenda
Do Mix Your Drinks
Tom Stuart will be talking about how abstract algebra is useful for Ruby programmers, both when writing everyday programs and when going to the pub afterwards. As an example he'll show how to use his VectorSpace library to compare and manipulate structured data for free.
Ruby+Arduino
Tomasz Wegrzanowski will be giving a talk that he describes as follows:
Arduino is an inexpensive Open Source physical computing
platform which makes building interactive gadgets of your design
much easier on the hardware side. Now let's add some Ruby
so programming those gadgets becomes easy too...
Pub
After the meeting it's usual to continue the meeting in a more informal style at The Crown Tavern. This pub is just down the street from our new venue, in fact you'd have to walk past it on the way to the tube station, so it's hard to avoid. Speaking of avoiding things, if you can't make the main meeting, we aim to be in the pub from about 8pm and you're more than welcome to come along and help us prop up the bar.
Registration
We need people to register with Skills Matter if they are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter know how many people to expect to turn up and plan the venue accordingly. We shouldn't have capacity problems with the new venue, but you should still register as early as you can to help them out.
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on Jun 17, 2009
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of June, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at either their offices or one of their overflow venues. The venue we get is dependent on how many people register and the availability of sponsorship to pay for a larger room. Do your bit by registering early.
Agenda
RDF in Rails
Patrick Sinclair will be talking about publishing RDF from Rails and getting the community to participate in Linked Data.
A video of Patrick's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
DSL Or A Code Smell...
Abdel A. Saleh recently ran a code review of a DSL he was writing at work. He's going to let us know what he learned from that experience:
DSLs are very powerful tools but are they always necessary?
This is a tale in code about my work on a small 'Request Throttling' library where I thought I
needed a DSL but it turned out I was sorely mistaken. I'll highlight some common DSLing
techniques and the decisions that steered me away from them.
A video of Abdel's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
2 Apps, 1 Test : Distributed Ruby Unit Testing
Tom Lea has a distributed testing framework called Drunit that he's going to tell us about. Drunit (from the Readme) is:
A library for running tests across multiple applications from
a single test case.
and, crucially:
Over 14% more awesome than a bag of chips.
A video of Tom's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
Pub
At the end of all this we like to drop our polite facade and scramble to be first at the bar and woe betide anyone that gets in our way. The pub we head to is The Crown Tavern, which is conveniently located close to all of the venues that Skills Matter provide. If the main meeting doesn't fit with your hectic schedule surely you can fit in a pint on the way home? We aim to finish up the talks at 8pm, so come to the pub for then and chat with your local ruby community.
Registration
We need people to register with Skills Matter if they are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter know how many people to expect to turn up and plan the venue accordingly. If enough people register we need to book a larger venue, but that can take some time so Skills Matter need some notice to do so. So please register as early as you can. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don't want that!
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on May 19, 2009
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 18th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at their offices. The room is currently at capacity, but if you register with them they'll put you on a waiting list.
Agenda
Ruby FFI
Sean O'Halpin will be talking about Ruby FFI, probably using his FFI-ncurses gem to provide some examples.
Treetop
Roland Swingler has been looking at Treetop:
Regular expressions are great but they're unreadable when complex, and
there are some things they just can't do. The alternative is to build
a language parser - but that's really hard, isn't it? In this talk,
I'll try and dispell that idea and show how building little languages
in ruby is really simple. I'll show two examples: defining a
mini-language from scratch to build XMPP bots, and using it as part of
your screen-scraping toolbox.
A video of Roland's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
Scheme
James Coglan is writing a Scheme interpreter in Ruby:
Scheme is a member
of the Lisp
family of languages, and is an excellent place to start if you're
interested in writing your own language. It's small and simple to parse,
yet has several advanced features that are only now becoming mainstream.
Based on Heist, my main interpreter
project, I present a brief overview of Scheme and use
Treetop to create a small runtime that
includes booleans, integer arithmetic, variables, user-defined functions,
conditionals, recursion and lexical closures.
A video of James' talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
Pub
It's tradition at LRUG to head to the local pub after the talks to relax and chat with other rubyists. We go to The Crown Tavern which is a short walk from either of the venues Skills Matter provides. If you can't make the main meeting you'll find plenty of rubyists propping up the bar from about 8:00pm onwards after the talks. Come along!
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come (or even just thinking about it). Please register as early as you can. In fact, go and do it now! The reason for this is that if a lot of folk want to come we obviously need a larger room and Skills Matter need about a week's notice to book it. They'll only do so if the registrations dictate it. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don't want that!
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on May 05, 2009
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 20th of April, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at their overflow venue (if you've never been you can use this handy map to find it). On very busy nights we've had to turn people away, so make sure that you do register your attendance early to avoid this.
Agenda
There was a very positive response to the February lightning talk meeting, but organising eight or nine speakers is a bit of a hassle, so we're going to try out having three shorter talks instead of two longer ones. The Guinea Pig talks for this are:
Ruby Invoicing Framework Gem
Martin Kleppmann is the author of the invoicing gem (on GitHub) and is going to give a talk about it. The invoicing gem provides a solid basis for any commercial web app, by solving the standard problems of financial transactions neatly and concisely, allowing you to focus on the business logic, and being flexible enough to grow and handle pretty complex stuff when you need it: multi-currency support, international taxation and reseller networks, for example. Under the hood it's basically a full accrual accounting system, but that is hidden behind a clean Ruby API which requires no accounting knowledge. Martin will also touch on OAccounts, an initiative to create an open standard for exchanging accounting data between different apps.
A video of Martin's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
A Modular Approach to Views
Jon Gilbraith has been working on taking a modular approach to views and creating builder classes to abstract structural html and view logic into Ruby blocks. In this talk he's going to present that approach and some of the stuff he's learnt along the way.
A video of Jon's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
Using Geokit in Social Apps
Paul Jensen is going to give a talk about using Geokit, with a particular focus on it's use in Social Apps. Geokit is a rubygem and Rails plugin for geocoding, distance calculation, location finding, and ip address-based lookup. In this talk he'll run through the functionality provided by Geokit, and show off the magic in action with a google maps/twitter/trusted places mashup.
A video of Paul's talk is available on the Skills Matter site.
Pub
After three talks it's likely we'll need some kind of liquid comfort. Luckily there's a convenient pub just a short walk from either of the Skills Matter venues: The Crown Tavern. We aim to finish the talks and be crowding the bar by about 8:00pm. If you can't make it to the main meeting you should use this info to turn up at about 7:50pm and get the drinks in.
Mine's a Franziskaner.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. You should register as early as you can, so do so now! If we need a big room Skills Matter need about a week to book it, and will only do so if the registrations dictate it, so registering late means you might get put on a waiting list or turned away. And we don't want that.
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on Mar 23, 2009
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of MArch, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space, either at their offices or their overflow venue, depending on the number of registrations. On very busy nights we've had to turn people away, so make sure that you do register your attendance early to avoid this.
Agenda
Redcar: Ruby, Gnome and Textmate
Daniel Lucraft has been building Redcar for some time now and wants to talk about it:
Redcar is a programmer's text editor for Gnome, written in Ruby. In this talk I'll
show off Redcar's features, and then take a look into how it's implemented. We'll also
look at the Ruby-GNOME2 bindings, and how to interface Vala (a C# like language) with Ruby
for performance.
Daniel's even hoping to push his first milestone release of Redcar just before the meeting. You can track his progress on the Redcar lighthouse project.
Cucumber, Celerity, & FireWatir
Aidy Lewis is going to give a talk about testing:
The talk will explain Story-Driven-Development(SDD) and its benefits. A sample application will be
built in real-time using SDD with Rspec Cucumber. Tests
will be run in-browser with FireWatir and through
a headless-browser using Celerity and JRuby.
A video of Aidy's talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video.
Pub
It's tradition that after the talks we descend on The Crown Tavern, and make it difficult for anyone to get served at the bar for about 20 minutes. This pub is very close to Skills Matter, and only a short stumble across Clerkenwell "Green" from the overflow venue if we're using it, and therefore is perfect for our post-meeting activities. The meeting normally wraps up at about 8:00pm, so if you can't make it to that but still want to talk ruby, you'll find plenty of rubyists in this pub. Come along!
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. As we mentioned above, they need us to register for fire-regulations and making sure we get the best sized room for the number of attendees.
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on Feb 17, 2009