Meetings
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of January, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Skills Matter are hosting us as usual in their offices, but you'll need to register your attendance for them to let you in.
Agenda
Couch DB
Paul Carey has been tinkering with CouchDB for a while and has even written a ruby library called RelaxDB for it. In his talk he's going to cover both of those things.
Abstractions For Website APIs
Paul Mison is going to do a short talk on libraries and abstractions for website APIs. Specifically how he thinks they should be written (and how he thinks they shouldn't be). The talk will mostly focus on Flickr, so an understanding of Flickr's API and the existing abstractions might be of use.
Pub
There's always time for a drink after the meeting and we usually head to The Crown Tavern which is just round the corner from the venue. If you can't make it to the talks part of the evening, the pub should be overflowing with ruby chat from about 8:00pm onwards, so come along!
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. 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 Jan 05, 2009
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of December, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter have provided their overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green for this meeting because of the number of registrations. They still want you to register your attendance though, so you can be let into the venue.
Agenda
Javascript Testing
Chris O'Sullivan loves testing, and it's been eating away at him that he can't test the javascript he writes for his rails apps. In this talk he'll be showing off how he finally worked out how to test this stuff and return to the shores of Testingland.
A video of Chris's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.
Ruby Vs. The World
Matthew Rudy Jacobs has been comparing Ruby against how other languages do similar things. In this talk he's going to present his findings and suggest some things that as Rubyists we might learn from our alternate language using brethren.
A video of Matthew's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.
Pub
At the end of all things, one fact will be carved upon the smouldering husk that was once this earth. That fact shall read:
After each LRUG meeting, the assembled masses did reconvene at The Crown Tavern,
but a short distance from the original meeting point, and from there did imbibe boozes. All were welcome,
even those who couldn't make the main talks. And there was much rejoicing in the tavern."
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows Skills Matter to organise the most appropriate room for the number of people coming. In the past we've had to turn people away who didn't register because the room was full and there was no room for extra bodies. We don't like having to do that, so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room) and secure your place.
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 Nov 25, 2008
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of November, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will choose the most appropriate venue based on the number of registrations. Going on past meetings it'll be either in Skills Matter's offices or their overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. Please do register your attendance early to help them choose the right venue.
Agenda
Packet Sniffing
James Darling has recently been hacking about with the Shazam iPhone app and the Last.fm API in an attempt to scrobble his vinyl listening habits. Along the way he used a ruby packet sniffing tool. In this short talk he's going to show off the packet sniffer and the end-to-end hack he came up with.
A video of James's talk (actually presented by Chris Mear due to illness), filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.
One code-base, Many projects
Jason Cale offered to run a talk / discussion on how to cope with evolving a single project into a maintainable code-base for multiple projects. That's not a great distilation of his idea, so here are his words:
The basic premise of what I have now is a (yet another) custom CMS / E-commerce system that an agency
commissioned me to build ..
The system serves both flash websites (via restful apis), and a couple of html based ones .. I'm
currently trying to work out the best way to keep a single code base that can serve present
development, and future ones .. be flexible and 'hackable' and maintainable .. at the moment
its a mix of plugins, config files and theme based extensions.
I certainly don't have all the answers .. but with a bit of research I could present what I've
come up with so far, other ideas I've come across (most things online I've found just mention
it is hard) and then open it up for discussion.
At the moment instead of it being 'lessons learned' etc, it would still be very present tense,
because these problems are ones I'm still working through.
Jason might post on the mailing list before the meeting some of his ideas to help stimulate the discussion part of his talk. So if you are intersted make sure you watch out for his mails.
A video of Jasons talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.
Pub
Once the hullabaloo of the talks is over with we finish up the evening with a couple of drinks in The Crown Tavern which is just a short walk from the venue. If you can't make it for the talks you can still make it down to catch up on all the gossip.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows Skills Matter to organise the most appropriate room for the number of people coming. In the past we've had to turn people away who didn't register because the room was full and there was no room for extra bodies. We don't like having to do that, so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room) and secure your place.
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 Oct 29, 2008
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 13th of October, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Our hosts Skills Matter will choose the most appropriate venue based on the number of registrations. Going on past meetings it'll be either in Skills Matter's offices or their overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. Please do register your attendance early to help them choose the right venue.
Agenda
Event Stream and LRUG Quiz
Steve Ganly will first talk about developing EventStream - a technique to
record and playback non-idempotent requests on a web site. Initially a
developers tool it also gives some interesting possibilities when used
in production too.
Steve will then host the LRUG pub quiz, covering the specialist topics
of Ruby, Rails and a whole cartload of stuff for geeks to chuckle over.
Pub
After the talks we head on over to a local pub, The Crown Tavern, for a thorough debriefing session. The pub is open to all, so if you can't make the talks for whatever reason, come on down to the pub and get them in early (mine's a Franziskaner, cheers!).
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows Skills Matter to organise the most appropriate room for the number of people coming. In the past we've had to turn people away who didn't register because the room was full and there was no room for extra bodies. We don't like having to do that, so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room) and secure your place.
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 Oct 01, 2008
The September 2008 meeting of LRUG will be held on Monday 8th September, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. Please register here. It will either be at Skills Matter, or their overflow venue at The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green, depending on the number of registrations.
Agenda
Top Ten Most Horrendous Ruby Hacks
Daniel Lucraft will be going through 10 horrendous ruby hacks, taken from code written by both himself and others. While he already has a number of horrible pieces of code, there's always room for more, so don't be shy, send your examples to him (dan at fluentradical dot com) and you may make the top ten!
RLisp - Lisp inside Ruby
Tomasz Wegrzanowski will be presenting a talk on his project RLisp, a Lisp dialect naturally embedded in Ruby
Pub
The talks generally are all done and dusted by 8pm, at which point we decamp to the local pub, The Crown Tavern for a spot of socialising. If you can't make the talks for whatever reason, you're always welcome to turn up just for the post-mortem in the pub.
Posted by Tom Ward on Aug 12, 2008