Meetings
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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
The May 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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
Food and Drinks

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:
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.
Brighton Ruby ticket prizedraw

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:
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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
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?
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.
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.

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:
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
Afterwards
The talks should be finished by 8pm. If you'd like to socialise with other LRUG
attendees afterwards, you have two choices:
- 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.
- 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
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.
Search Relevancy
Rosa Fox says:
A quick introduction to search result relevancy featuring GOV.UK.
_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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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
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
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
- Teams should have no more than 4 members (we may adjust this up or down on
the night depending on attendance or prize divisibility).
- Utilising internet devices to obtain answers is strictly forbidden - we
expect you to use your onboard brain, not your outboard one.
- The quiz master's word is final in any disputes.
Prizes
Our lovely sponsors have donated the following:
-
Copies of “99 Bottles of OOP” by
Sandi Metz and Katrina
Owen provided by:

-
Copies of “Exceptional Ruby” by Avdi
Grimm provided by:

-
Parcels of Pact coffee provided by:

-
3-month subscriptions to Ruby Tapas provided by:

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:
- 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.
- 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
The December 2017 meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 11th 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
Everyday cryptography - talking about crypto without complex maths
Xavier Riley says:
Good cryptography is hard, but learning the basic concepts don't have to
have to be. By focussing on the key concepts, rather than the exotic maths,
I hope we can initiate more people into understanding what good security
looks like without having to take a University course. For those who already
know their MACs from their IKEs, I hope this talk offers some useful ways
of communicating these concepts to colleagues, friends and family.
Fun with an Amazon Echo, Ruby and Recipes
Miles Woodroffe says:
Voice interfaces open up so many interesting possibilities and in this talk
I'll show you how to very quickly build and deploy a useful "skill" with
Ruby, and at the same time, make sure you hopefully don't burn the dinner.
How I met "Double Dutch" and he helped to remedy fear of injection.
Marek Labos says:
The story about how ideas from other languages can help us write
simple, elegant Ruby code. In this presentation we will look at a Double Dispatch pattern,
Excel(spreadsheet) injection, how they go together and why fighting
(accidental) code complexity matters.
Afterwards
We aim to finish up the talks by 8pm and if you'd like to socialise with other
LRUG attendees afterwards you have two choices:
- 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.
- 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 04, 2017