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If you’re after the link for registering for tonight here it is
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/4587070050
Xavier Riley will be talking about JRuby, details are in the EventBrite registration.
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That’s right - we’re back, 3 weeks from tomorrow!
This time we’re not going anywhere - we have set ourselves a new goal - we’ll announce the date of the following event at the next event!
We’re remaining at the same venue as before, The Keep in Guildford - we have limited space so please register to avoid disappointment.
Agenda
Gareth Adams - Remedial Unicode for Rubyists
John Beynon - ElasticSearch 101
Registration - http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/4766297123
And here’s a Lanyrd link for the event too http://lanyrd.com/2012/surrey-rubyists-5-the-return/
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Hi everyone, we have a new twitter account! @surreyrubyists - make sure you’re following us to keep up to date with the Surrey Ruby User Group. We’re busy planning the next meeting…it will be this year, it will be in November.
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After a break, we are rebooting Surrey Rubyists! We have a new venue and I’ve got some help which will make all the difference!
The Details
The next meet will be on: Tuesday 24th January 2012
Starts: 7:00pm
Price: FREE
The new venue is: The Keep, 29 Castle St, Guildford, Surrey, GU1 3UW (map: http://g.co/maps/sja8n, site: http://www.thekeepguildford.co.uk)
What’s happening on the night?
This time round we have 4 x 30 minute talks:
1. My first Ad Network - Neil Middleton
Since August Kyan have been developing an advertising network for a client. This presentation will be a 100mph overview of how we decided to structure the project, some of the key decisions we made along the way, and how we are managing the system. We’ll be looking at the technologies used, plus having a dive into some of the ancillary support tools that we use day to day.
There will be no code in this presentation.
I am one of the lead developers on the project at Kyan, the best Ruby agency in Guildford at the top of the High Street. I’ve been developing on the web for bloomin’ ages, and am a big time Heroku advocate. I don’t like marmite.
2. Background processing with Redis and Resque - Gavin Heavyside
Resque is a Redis-backed library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later. Whether you want to keep your web app responsive to users by doing the heavy lifting asynchronously, or you want to build an event-driven processing pipeline, Resque can give you a distributed queue-driven, persistent, asynchronous platform. Resque is powered by Redis, a fast, persistent data structures server. I’ll introduce and demo the features of Redis, and show how you can do background processing or build a message queue driven architecture using Resque.
I am Director of Engineering at MyDrive Solutions, a Guildford-based company that specialises in analysis of vehicle telematics data for the insurance industry. We use Redis for several tasks, and Resque powers our queue-driven scalable distributed data processing pipeline.
3. Game Development in Ruby - Peter Cooper
Lots of demos and weird stuff, just to keep it fun. I’m interested in ways to use games and graphics to cover non-gaming topics as well.
Peter does a million and one things but you probably know him from one of the following:
4. Your Tests Are Lying To You - Chris Parsons
Mocks have an a bad rap lately. We’ve all seen brittle and unreadable test code riddled with ‘shouldreceive’ and ‘mockmodel’, leading to classes people don’t dare to touch. RSpec has now taken “mock_model” out of their default scaffolding for Rails controllers, and is preferring real objects. Does this mean that the concept of interaction testing is flawed? Well designed code is easy to test, and mocks enhance your sense of smell. State-based testing will lie to you and hide your bad code for longer, but your interaction tests explode if you don’t keep your code clean and your object collaborators few. That’s as it should be. Come to this talk if you want to hear a robust defence of mocks as a testing tool, see some examples of ruby code exhibiting the dangers of a reliance on state-based testing, and hear how you can use mocks to heighten your sense of smell, decrease coupling and increase cohesion.
Chris Parsons is a freelance thinker, agilist, coder, trainer, technologist and testing addict. He has been crafting software professionally for 13 years, with the last 6 years spent mostly working with Ruby.
Register
You can register for this free event here: http://surreyrubyists4.eventbrite.com/
Big Thanks
Thanks to two awesome companies: 1minus1 and Kyan. We are combining our skills to organise Surrey Rubyists, help spread the word and try out some interesting new ideas. Thanks guys <3 <3 <3 <3
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First of all, thanks to everyone that came tonight. I think everyone enjoyed the evening and learnt a lot.
Congrats to threedaymonk for getting two players to the final, that was pretty hardcore!
For those that are interested, all the game code and players are now up on github: http://github.com/andypike/hangman. Feel free to tweak your player to see if you can beat the infamous threedaymonk (normal) player.
The full draw and results are in the knockout.xls file which is in the root.
If you have any feedback (positive or negative) please let me know (even small code improvements) and if you fancy speaking next time round, please let me know (suggestions here: http://surreyrubyists.uservoice.com)
Cheers
Andy
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I’ve found it hard to find speakers this month so we’re going to do something a little different this time. This month we are holding the very first Surrey Rubyists Coding Competition!
Competition Overview
We will be playing a well known turn based game. You will need to implement an AI player in Ruby for this game within the time allowed. Then we have a knock-out competition where these players fight to the death until one winner is left standing.
You can join as individuals or pairs. If you are a newbie, you’re welcome to join in of course. I’m sure there will be an experienced Rubyists that will be happy to pair up with you if you would like to.
After the competition is over (time permitting) we can take a look at the winning entry and see what we can all learnt.
This should be a fun and entertaining evening so tell your friends!
What you need
You (or your pair) will need the following to be able to participate:
More Details
On the night I will give full details of the game and what the game rules are. It’s a well known game and the rules are very simple.
For now, I can tell you that you will need to create a class that implements three methods. When your player is playing in a match, these methods will be called at various points by the main game framework program that I have created (o_O). The game continues with each player taking a turn until there is a winner. The winner of the game moves through to the next round.
You are free to implement your player however you see fit, but the following rules will apply:
Where and when?
The Bridge Barn pub in Woking (Bridge Barn Beefeater & Premier Inn, Bridge Barn Lane, Woking, GU21 6NL). Here’s the map on Tuesday 28th June. The games will begin at 7:00pm so get there a bit before so you can set-up.
Registration
You can register your place for this free event here: http://surreyrubyists3.eventbrite.com/
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