November 2008 Meeting
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.
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.
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