What

September marked the resumption of ScotRUG in person meetups. It was great to see so many faces new and old! As the light continues to fade from the sky, and thoughts turn to the cooler days of the year, it’s time to look forward to our October meet up. Meetups aren’t all ScotRUG is about, but it is great to talk to folks in person. If you’re coming along for the second time, bring someone new with you!

So: what’s up this month?

There is a lot of chatter about AI right now. Since Google’s Transformer paper Attention is All You Need was published in 2017, research focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) has been intense. And then: obscene amounts of money and overly reactive marketing.

However, investment has lead to a number of interesting products, which offer more approaches to some programming tasks, and the potential of features that programs can offer. Let’s look at this through a Ruby lens.

This month we have talks brought to us by the fine people of RubyNess.

First up, we have Gavin Morrice, who promises “How to build an LLM from scratch in Ruby”. Secondly, we have Sergey Sergyenko, who will talk about how to use an LLM from your Ruby programs.

And finally, bring your laptops! Sergey wants to chat to people about their programming environments, and encouarge everyone to share tips.

Where and When?

We’ll be meeting at 18:00 on the 9th of October at FreeAgent’s offices on Fountainbridge in Edinburgh. Please sign up over on Meetup

As usual, we’ll have time to socialise before and after.

Huge thanks to both RubyNess for organising the talks and FreeAgent for the lovely event space and the food.

Where and When?

Oh my gosh - it’s 2025, and we haven’t met up in forever. After Haggis Ruby last year, we’ve had counts on hands one meeting this year. It’s the longest break between meetups ever (don’t let the website tell you otherwise). Anyway, with the summer winding down and the bounty of autumn heading our way, ScotRUG is back!

We’ll be meeting at 18:00 on the 11th of September at FreeAgent’s offices on Fountainbridge in Edinburgh. Please sign up over on Meetup

What

…a meetup, a presentation, some lovely chat with other Ruby folks, and some learning.

Longtime ScotRUG member Colin Gemmell is going to give us a talk about work he’s been doing to update the legendary JavaScript at his work:

Replacing React with Hotwire

Using React back in 2011 for the front end of a interactive page was pretty much a no-brainer but at FreeAgent it never really worked out that well. With a dev team that is overwhelmingly filled with rails developers making changes to a critical part of the app written in React was slow work and often feel to a single team. Earlier this year we decided to start the process of removing React from the code base. In this talk I’ll go through more of the motivation for removing react and how we have already replaced part of the react with hotwire and look ahead to how we might remove the rest.

This month, we’re kindly hosted by FreeAgent - Accounting Software for your small business, built in sunny Scotland

Where and When?

Online, Thursday, 12th December 2024, from 18:00 until 19:30

What

It’s been a while (February)! I hope everyone is coping well with the cold. We do have some warming news though!

We are in December, which only means two thing - You have had time to rest from the haggis ruby conference, and you are ready for more ruby adventure. (right?) Well, aren’t you in luck! ScotRUG will be back this month to look at what the new Ruby version has to offer. What has changed, what’s new, how does everyone feel about it - let’s talk !

Everyone is welcome. Experimented rubyist wanting to have a sneak pick of what’s comming, or neophyte looking to know more about Ruby, come along and let’s discuss all the Ruby things!

Where and When?

Thursday 15th February, 2024 From 18:00 until 19:30

Hybrid event - online and at the FreeAgent offices:

One Edinburgh Quay 133 Fountainbridge Edinburgh EH3 9QG

What

A fun workshop looking at the Yatzy refactoring kata. The starting point will be the Ruby version of Emily Bache’s repository and thus will use her version of the dice game rules.

Where and When?

Online, Wednesday, 20th December 2023, from 18:00 until 19:30

What

We are in December, which only means one thing (yes, just one!) - we have had insights on what the new Ruby version might look like.

As a result, we will have a look at what the new version will bring, what has changed, what’s new, how does everyone feel about it - let’s talk !

If you are new to Ruby, this is a good introduction to get insights on how Ruby shares new version and what it looks like, so come along and let’s discuss all the Ruby things!

This is our last one for the year, and it will happen online.

Where and When?

Thursday 9th November 2023, 18:00 - 19:30

What

Every website should aim to make it easy for all users to find, consume or purchase what they are looking for, be that information, entertainment or products.

The aim of every web developer therefore should be to remove friction and make the users’ experience as pleasant as possible.

This is a user-centered talk about usability, accessibility, and information architecture. It will cover some solutions to common problems but its main objective is to provide food for thought and be a conversation starter.

Who

Carme Mias is a software engineer from Glasgow, currently working in the website team at FreeAgent.

She has been working in the tech industry for over 20 years and has a varied career spanning hardware, support, networks, web design and development.

You can find her on LinkedIn

Where and When?

Online.

Thursday 12th October 2023, from 18:00 until 19:30

What

James has just been to Euruko, the Europe Ruby Conference. This year it was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, and included a celebration of Ruby’s 30th birthday.

He will tell us all about the conference and what his highlights from it have been, As usual, we’re hoping for plenty of conversation!

Who

James Bell is a senior engineering manager at FreeAgent and long term organiser of this very meetup. You can find him on:

• Mastodon: @sarcain@ruby.social
• Twitter: @sarcainian

Where and When?

Thursday 14 September, 2023 18:00 - 19:30

Online

Signup and get the link on the day from the meetup page

What

Daniel Holz will talk about how thinking about a CI/CD system can make you think about the value of the tests you write

Who

Daniel is a staff software engineer in FreeAgent’s Dev Platform team.

With many year’s experience on performance, deployment and test infrastructure and automation, he has worked both here in the UK and in Australia.

Where and When?

Thursday 10 August, 18:00 - 19:30

What

Ayush will give us a bit of an introduction to Turbo Native and cover why hybrid apps get such a bad rap, how to get them right, and how Turbo Native can be used to build hybrid apps that don’t suck.

Who

Ayush Newatia is a software developer with over 9 years experience and part of the Bridgetown core team.

You can find him online on:

• Github: https://github.com/ayushn21
• Website: https://radioactivetoy.tech/

Where and When?

Thursday, 13th July from 18:00 until 19:30

Online

What

A talk on how the Ruby and Ruby on Rails ecosystems are supported. Who develops the language and the framework? Who pays for that work? What are the shortcomings of this? How can you or your company get involved?

Who

James Bell is a senior engineering manager at FreeAgent and long term organiser of this very meetup. You can find him on:

• Mastodon: @sarcain@ruby.social
• Twitter: @sarcainian

Hello folks! We’re not having a meetup in May, but will be back with you in June. In the meantime, keep an eye out for some new community spaces we’re working on, that we hope to release this month too. And, as per Avdi Grimm, happy hacking!

Where and When?

Thursday 13 April, 18:00 - online

What

It’s been a while since we last looked into contrinuting to Open Source. We’ll discuss pros and cons of the model, how to get started if you’ve never contributed before and how to keep going as a seasoned contributor.

Where and When?

Thursday 16th March 2023, 18:00-19:30, online

What

MRSK is a new deployment system from 37signals, which they pitch as “Capistrano for containers”.

While it is one solution among many, the key differentiator here is that it’s simple, like Docker Swarm, but imperative rather than declarative. What’s extra interesting for us is that it’s also largely written in Ruby - though it sensibly leans on other projects (like traefik) where appropriate.

It’s new, none of us are experts, so let’s dig into the project and maybe into the code, and see what we can learn.

Where and When?

Thursday, 9th February 2023, 18:00-19:30 Online

Register from meetup.com to get the video link on the day!

What

Over the last year, Cristian has been experimenting with alternative frontend web programming stacks to use with Rails. Many people already know about Turbo, so instead he’d like to talk a bit about a couple classic libraries that work really well together: htmx and Alpine. He’ll also give us a high-level overview of what Inertia.js is and what it allows you to do.

Who

Cristian Rash is a software engineer with over 15 years experience who specialises on Ruby, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Redis and Linux. He is co-founder and has been part of the Argentinian WeCode community for the past 9 years.

Why hello there! Welcome to 2023: new year, new Ruby version. 2022 was a great year for the Ruby ecosystem: a major new version of an interesting web framework (Hanami ), the release of [a Ruby version](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2022/12/25/ruby-3-2-0-released/ that’s bringing performance improvements and Web Assembly support, version 1.0 of Bridgetown.rb, a new view framework, the continuing rise of Mastodon and the return of awesome in person conferences.

Not to mention all the other amazing work that the community continues to do - from meetup groups like us to podcasts, blog posts and efforts to help even more people join the community via First Ruby Friend.

With all that going on, there’s plenty to read up on. As per usual, ScotRUG is going to take a break from Meetups over January while we settle into the new year. See you on the first Thursday in February!

• The ScotRUG organisers (Carme, James and Kevin)

Where and When?

We’ll meet on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00: November 10th. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out the link via our Meetup page for the event closer to the time.

What

Bridgetown is a modern progressive site generator with Jekyll ancestry. Ayush will to be our guide as they take us on a whistle-stop tour of its biggest and best features; and show us how it brings Ruby-powered site generation into 2022.

Who

Find Ayush Newatia on the following:

Github: https://github.com/ayushn21 Twitter: @ayushn21

Where and When?

Once again we’ll meet online. It’ll be Thursday 8th September, at 18:00. We’ll be using Google Meet for this meetup. We’ll send out the link via our Meetup page on the day itself. So sign up there!

What

This month we will have a Lean Coffee! Bring 3 topics (or more?) you would like to discuss and everyone will vote for their favourites. We will then start discussing about those topics starting with the most voted one. Any topics are good topics, if you are new to ruby, that’s a good opportunity to come and ask questions :-)

Where and When?

We’ll meet on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00: August 11th. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out the link via our Meetup page for the event closer to the time.

What

In Edinburgh, the summer festivals have kicked off in a full throated way for the first time since the start of the ongoing pandemic. Artists and performers of all kinds range across the city, sharing and building stories with audiences. Well, Noah Gibbs knows about story telling and would like to help you out! He says:

Most slides are horribly bad. They’re boring and they’re alienating. They’re awful to see and awful to make. They can be much better when you realise a slide presentation is a slow-motion comic. Let me teach you about visual storytelling. We’ll un-suck some bad slides from the internet without spending a ton of time.

See some of you on Thursday!

When and Where

We’ll meet on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00 on Thursday, June 9th. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out the link via our Meetup page for the event closer to the time.

What

Cristian Rasch is coming to show off the virtues of combining a couple of modern, declarative JS libraries to help build a simpler front end.

We’ve had talks on similar themes on Stimulus JS and Hotwire over time. It’ll be wonderful to understand other alternatives!

Who

Cristian Rash is a software engineer with over 15 years experience who specialises on Ruby, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Redis and Linux. He is co-founder and has been part of the Argentinian WeCode community for the past 9 years.

You can reach him on Twitter at @cristianrasch

Where and When?

We’ll meet on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00: May 12th. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out the link via our Meetup page for the event closer to the time.

What

Sergey Sergyenko will join us from Lithuania and tell us about the idea behind the Global Day of Code Retreat. As part of the event, he will code a game of life in Ruby and discuss Test Driven Development (TDD) and other good practices.

Who

Sergey Sergyenko is CEO of the software development agency Cybergizer and founder of the Belarus Ruby user group.

You can find him on Twitter @sergyenko

Where and When?

We’re still running things online. Though most legal restrictions required by gathering in person have been removed in Scotland (keep those masks on though), the rates of infection are the highest they have ever been. Since we have folk who are at elevated risk, as well as people distributed across the country, it seems sensible to keep the online meetings going until we’re more comfortable.

As usual, we’ll meet on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00: April 14th. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out the link via our Meetup page for the event closer to the time.

What

Kevin Jacoby is going to be presenting some Ruby console tooling you can use to make your console app look great!

He says: “If you want a fancy looking table or to add some colours to your text, there are plenty of gems that can help you do this. We will have a look at some of these gems and then try them out in our own (dummy) console app.”

Where and When?

Oh well, time has been flying, and it’s that time of the month again. The sunshine is back in Edinburgh, we get to have longer days and that makes everyone just a tad happier! Once again we’ll meet online. It’ll be Thursday 10th March, at 18:00. We’ll be using Google Meet for this meetup. We’ll send out the link via our Meetup page, so sign up there!

What?

This month we will explore Dry Struct! To quote dry-rb website: dry-rb is a collection of next-generation Ruby libraries. You might be familiar with it if you have been using Hanami. We will explore the code for dry-struct together, so be ready to dive into some actual ruby code this week !

See you tonight ! J & K

Where and When?

Once again we’ll meet online. It’ll be Thursday February the 10th, at 18:00. We’ll be using Google Meet for this meetup. We’ll send out the link via our Meetup page on the day itself. So sign up there!

What?

This month we will have a Lean Coffee! Bring 3 topics (or more?) you would like to discuss and everyone will vote for their favourites. We will then start discussing about those topics starting with the most voted one. Any topics are good topics, if you are new to ruby, that’s a good opportunity to come and ask questions :-)

See you next week ! James & Kevin

Unbeliveable, it’s already December. Days are short (therefore nights are long). It is this time of the year in Scotland when the outside is dark and cold, temperature can go below 0 but that won’t stop us from enjoying what the country has to offer during this festive period. Therefore, Scotrug will meet again this month!

Where and When?

The second Thursday this month is the 9th of December, and we’ll aim to start at our usual time of 18:00. The pandemic is still on - beware of the new Omicron variant, so we’re still meeting online; Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out a link via our Meetup page for the event.

What?

As per usual, we are in December, which means we have had insights on what the new Ruby version might look like. As a result, we will have a look at what the new version will bring, what has changed, what’s new, how does everyone feel about it - let’s talk !

If you are new to Ruby, this is a good introduction to get insights on how Ruby shares new version and what it looks like, so come along and let’s discuss all the Ruby things!

Kevin & James

Where and When?

The second Thursday this month is the 11th of November, and we’ll aim to start at our usual time of 18:00. The pandemic is still on, so we’re still meeting online; next year will likely bring new experiments. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out a link via our Meetup page for the event.

What?

This year has seen the maturing of Hotwire, and the announcement of it being the default way to build new web applications for Rails 7. What’s it actually like to work with though? Well, Elizabeth and Cédric from Bearer are coming to talk to us about just that.

Bearer helps security teams at tech companies automatically map data flows, and identify and mitigate data security risks across their products. While Bearer’s former tech stack included React, GraphQL and Rails, their current platform is built entirely with Rails and Hotwire. In this talk, they’ll share why they decided to use Rails and Hotwire, some example use cases, as well as their experience so far.

Where and When?

We unfortunately had to cancel last month’s meetup at the last minute, but are back again this month. Details are largely the same, only the date is different! So: we’ll meet online, on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00. Time to have a wee break if you’re working, meet your virtual friends . So: that’s the 14th of October at 18:00. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ve sent out the link via our Meetup page for the event.

What?

As we said last month: We will be talking about data structures. How do they (most commonly) work under the hood conceptually and why you would use one over the other? How do we use them in Ruby and what syntactic sugar do we have to access data from those data structures?

The good thing when we talk about data structures is you don’t have to be an expert with a specific language! We will talk about the general idea behind them and see how they work in Ruby. If this sounds fun, come along and learn together.

CANCELLED! We had to pull this event at the last minute. Thanks for your understanding!

Where and When?

Online! Things in Scotland will, for the first time in over a year, move out of the Level system come Monday the 9th of August. However, ScotRUG will continue to be online for the next handful of months. As usual, it’s the second Thursday of the month at 18:00. Time to have a wee break if you’re working, but not lean into your evenings too much. So: that’s the 12th of March at 18:00. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out the link via our Meetup page for the event closer to the time.

What?

Though it’s been a while since we updated the website, we’ve been continually running lockdown editions of ScotRUG’s meet ups. We took a summer break in July, but now with limited summer festivals spinning up all over Edinburgh, we’re back! While we ScotRUG organisers are considering what meetups might look like in the near future, we’re staying online for a bit.

Speaking of meetups, this month we’re lucky to have Mila Kirova come to speak to us. Mila is an engineer at FreeAgent in Edinburgh, and has recently been exploring the world of parsers in Ruby. If you’d like to know more about what parsers are, how they work, and you might be able to use them in unexpected ways, come along and learn together.

Where and When?

Another lockdown edition of ScotRUG’s meet ups will be heading your way this March. As usual, it’s the second Thursday of the month at 18:00. Time to have a wee break if you’re working, but not lean into your evenings too much. So: that’s the 11th of March at 18:00. Since we’re meeting virtually, we’ll send out the link via our Meetup page for the event closer to the time

What?

Spring is here! Well some springs are here and others are just around the corner. March also gifts us less time in bed as the clocks go forward, but grants us those lovely long evenings. I’m already grateful for the extra light, and a whole timeshifted hour of it is something to celebrate. No we’ll also experience plenty of rain and wind too, as befits the season. RailsConf is coming in April too, and this year they are selling tickets again. Although it will be remote and tickets are expensive, they should be good value. Rails 7 is coming this year, and it’s possible that this will happen at the conference. Closer to home, Euruko is also going remote this year and taking place in late May. So, there’s lots to look forward too±

Speaking of which, Ruby 3 was released in December. It brought a few experimental features that the core team hope will shape their way into full solutions in the future. Those of you that attended our December meetup will remember that we spent some time with Ractors, the new concurrency primitive that brings an actor like model into Ruby core. The estimable Noah Gibbs thinks they are fun, and will be talking to us all about them. So come along and learn!

Snacks and drinks are on you, with the plus side that you get to have what you want, and in your house. See you in March!

Where and When?

Remote is still key, though we passed 1_000_000 Scots who’ve had at least their first vaccination this week. So, let’s meetup again this Thursday the 11th of February at 18:00, in an online fashion. We’ll be using Google Meet again this month. We’ll send out the link via our Meetup page

What?

There is snow over most of Scotland at the moment. Which, as someone who lives close to the sea, is a surprise to me. It’s not that typically slushy snow either; good dry powder abounds, revealing crunching noises when you step into it. Even better than the snow is that it is no longer totally dark at 17:00 in Edinburgh - spring is coming!

February is a short month, and it seems an ideal time to go back to one of our more collaborative activities: code reading. A good few years ago we read over OpenStruct source code and after discussion learned about singleton classes, using core data classes as storage but designing your API not to leak, and other useful considerations. This month, we’ll go through another Ruby library class and hopefully learn new things!

Whether it’s your first time, or you’re a regular attendee, we’ll be glad to have you along.

See you on Thursday!

After the year that’s been, it was wonderful to finish off 2020 with a meetup to talk through the new Rails 3 features from preview 2. As is often our habit, ScotRUG will be taking a break in January to recharge. But it’s a good time to read up on Ruby 3, and perhaps also on Rails 6.1, Stimulus Reflex and Hotwire. There’s lots going on the Ruby world right now, with Standard, Rubyfmt and Prettier all attempting to address Ruby style choices by making those choices for you. There’s the constant evolution of the Dry.rb gems, and Hanami is heading towards a 2.0.

So, have a play and then let us know what you’d like to talk about next month! We’re always open for people to present to ScotRUG. Whether it’s something small or something big, something you’ve only just discovered, or something you built a long time ago. Take care, and we’ll see you next month.

Where and When?

On the 10th December (the second Thursday of the month), we’ll be meeting online for the final time in 2020. We’ll start the meeting at 18:00. The link will be sent out on Wednesday via our Meetup page. So, sign up there!

What?

So, 2020 is coming to a close. Rather than dwell on it, let us instead look forward to the consant gift of the season for Rubyists: a new Ruby version. Since we talked about Truffle Ruby last month, we figured it was reasonable to turn the spotlight back onto CRuby. This release should be a big one: version 3 is planned to be released on or around Christmas day. It’s been almost 8 years since Ruby 2.0.0-p0 was released, bringing with it refinements and a change in the default encoding of Ruby scripts to UTF-8. So, what does Ruby 3 promise us?

We have no speaker this week, instead we’ll wander through the release together and discuss what it turns up.

Where and When?

On the 12th November (the second Thursday of the month), we’ll be meeting online, as per 2020 protocols. We’ll start the meeting at 18:00. The link will be sent out on Wednesday via our Meetup page. So, sign up there!

What?

It’s been a few months since Scotland based or Scotland adjacent Rubyists got together to chat. It’s been a weird year aye? As the nights draw in, Samhain passes and we brace for the cold weather to come, it’s time to gather around again, have a blether and dig into some Ruby.

This month Duncan MacGregor is going to speak to us about Truffle Ruby. As with other interpreted languages, there are a number of options for a runtime to get your Ruby code to do something. The big one is CRuby, previously known as MRI or Matz’ Ruby intepretor. There’s also JRuby, the limited set of mruby, the fun of Ruby written in Ruby from Rubinius, the once and not forgotten Ruby Enterprise Edition and Maglev Ruby. Truffle is the newest of these, with a focus on high performance. Knowing what’s available means you can choose the most appropriate interpreter for the job you’re trying to get done, and each different interpreter also helps explore new areas for the other, pushing the state of the art forward.

It should enlightening, and we’ll leave plenty of time for questions. See you all there!

Where and When?

Like last month, we’ll be meeting up online. It’ll be Thursday July the 9th, at 18:00. We’ll be using Google Meet for this meetup. We’ll send out the link via our Meetup page

What?

Hello everyone! We had a lovely summer for about 2 weeks, but it looks like our Scottish summer is now finished :crying-but-i-knew-it-would-happen-emoji:. Gladly, this doesn’t stop ScotRUG to come back for another “wash your hands and stay safe at home” edition (whoop whoop!). This month, Xavier Riley, Senior Software Engineer at FreeAgent, will give a talk about building an autotune with Sonic Pi.

What is Sonic Pi ?

Sonic Pi is a live coding environment based on Ruby, originally designed to support both computing and music lessons in schools, developed by Sam Aaron in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in collaboration with Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Come along, we are always keen to meet new people :-) See you on Thursday !

Where and When?

Like last month, we’ll be meeting up online. It’ll be Thursday June the 11th, at 18:00. We’ll be using Google Meet for this meetup. We’ll send out the link via our Meetup page on the day itself. So sign up there!

What?

We entered phase 1 of the lockdown ease. Have any of you meet with friends in parks, enjoying the sunshine ? If meeting friends outside in the park is not your thing (like me) then perhaps meeting with us online from the comfort of your house sounds better ? Well, it may just be your lucky day! ScotRUG will meet again online and this month we will have a Lean Coffee!

Bring 3 topics (or more?) you would like to discuss and everyone will vote for their favourites. We will then start discussing about those topics starting with the most voted one.

See some (all?) of you on Thursday!

Where and When?

Like last month, we’ll be meeting up online. It’ll be Thursday May the 14th, at 18:00. Unlike last month, we’ll be using Google Meet for this meetup. It has a downside that you’ll need a Google account, but an upside that it has better moderation tools. We’ll send out the link via our Meetup page on the day itself. So sign up there!

What?

The weather has been surprisingly good? So that’s nice? I for one am finding that, although I can’t be out in it much, my spirits have been lifted by so much sunshine. One of the obvious consequences of the pandemic is that our ability to meet up in person has been, uh, severely curtailed. Amongst the Ruby community for example, the beloved Brighton Ruby has postponed the in person meetup ‘til next year. However, they are running an excellent looking Alt conference, at a very reasonable price. You should check it out.

RailsConf likewise was supposed to happen in Portland at the start of May. The hard working folk of RubyCentral (who organise the conference) and the awesome speakers worked hard to make the event happen in a new way! So, you may have noticed RailsConf 2020: Couch edition went live last week. Since we couldn’t attend in person, we thought it might be nice to discuss one of the talks with other Rubyists. Therefore, on Thursday we’re going to discuss “Encapsulating Views” by Joel Hawksley. You’ll need to have watched it first if you want to meaningfully participate.

To sum up: watch Encapsulating Views from this years RailsConf, and then meet up with us on Google Meet on Thursday the 14th to discuss what we saw. James will moderate the discussion.

See some of you on Thursday!

Where and When?

It’s April, and we’ll be meeting up online on Thursday the 16th, at 18:00.

What?

Spring is almost there! But it doesn’t mean that we can wander around. We still want to care for others and stay at home in those unprecedented times. For this reason, ScotRUG is back this month! but online :-) (Whoop Whoop!)

Our speaker this month Will Mathewson, Software Engineer at FreeAgent, will give a talk on how you can add types to your ruby code, making it safer and more reliable.

To join us, all you need is a device with internet access. We will all meet together via Skype which allows us to be 30 people at the same time. Should be enough right ?

See you all virtually on Thursday!

Kevin

Hi everyone, This is March already and the sun finally starts to shine again! If we only had good news, everything would be perfect, but… with Corona Virus getting closer and closer to Edinburgh, things may become a bit less enjoyable. In the spirit of keeping everyone safe and avoid spreading the virus, ScotRUG won’t be happening this week. Fear Not! Ruby will still be there the next time we meet (whenever that may be)! Maybe a fully remote meetup next time ?

Take care of yourselves and the people around you, don’t forget the NHS COVID-19 information and let’s try our best to not spread the virus.

We will see you soon!

Where and When?

It’s February, and we’ll be meeting up in FreeAgent on Thursday the 13th, at 18:00. That’s in their Edinburgh offices on Fountainbridge.

There will be someone at reception to let you up to FreeAgent’s offices from 17:30 until 18:00. If you arrive later than that, send an email to the mailing list or send us a tweet. Someone will come down for you.

What?

Winter has finally set in. Whirling snow in high speed wind gusts form blizzards and coat the Pentlands. Ten minutes later the snow shines underneath blue skies.

Another thing that’s changed, albeit much more slowly, has been CSS. Eric Meyer’s first CSS book from O’Reilly dealt comprehensively with the topic of the then version 2.1 CSS (before we introduced CSS levels). The current edition is the same depth as the two previous editions stacked on top of each other.

Along the way, many things have become easier such as rounded borders and box shadows, and we’ve unlocked much more powerful positioning tools. The most recent of which is Grid. Grid unlocks the ability for us to create previously very difficult designs. Jen Simmons, an old hand at CSS works at Mozilla and last year gave a great talk, live editing a page using CSS grid. So, we’re going to watch that, and have a chat about it afterwards.

ScotRUG welcomes first timers and regular attendees, whether you’re new to the group or not. As you can see, we also do Ruby adjacent things. So, come along! We’d love to see you there!

Where and When?

This January, we will be back in CodeBase on Thursday the 9th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

It’s a new decade! In the mix of the tradition of end of year lists, we’ve also been encountering plenty of end of decade lists. What was your favourite single? Movie? Ruby release? ScotRUG event?

Well, one of my favourite ScotRUG events of the last few years was a workshop we ran about Stimulus JS, the modest JavaScript framework that now ships with Rails. Now a few years later, Chris Green is going to talk to us a bit more about the framework, now that he’s had the chance to use it in production at FreeAgent.

As per usual, folks both new and old are welcomed along! We look forward to seeing you on Thursday.

Where and When?

This December, we’ll be meeting up in FreeAgent on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their Edinburgh offices on Fountainbridge.

There will be someone at reception to let you up to FreeAgent’s offices from 17:30 until 18:00. If you arrive later than that, send an email to the mailing list or send us a tweet. Someone will come down for you.

What?

December brings short nights and bright lights in Edinburgh. It’s also tradtionally a month of giving in Scotland, and this month ScotRUG are going to run a wee workshop with the aim of contributing back to Rails community.

Let’s set the scene: I find myself reading documentation in three main situations: getting started with something new, checking the details of something I’ve used before, and when trying to debug something that isn’t working. When I’m getting started with something, or when I’m stuck on something, documentation is something to help guide a new, possibly frustrated human towards more understanding. So when I come across documentation saying “just do this” or “simply do that” and I’ve already tried that thing, it’s quite frustrating. So, last month, the excellent Emma Barnes (who has a website to dedicated to this very problem) tweeted out examples of these documentation anti-patterns in the Rails docs. So, in the spirit of giving back, let’s see if we can contribute some PRs to remove this sort of language from the Rails guides to make them cleaner and less frustrating!

Bring a curious mind and a willingness to start editing, and we’ll go through how to contribute to the Rails docs, and then get started.

ScotRUG welcomes first timers and regular attendees, whether you’re new to the language or not. We’d love to see you there!

What Is This Update All About?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Sadly, our scheduled speaker Will has become unexpectedly unavailable at the last minute. That means we don’t have a talk about metaprogramming to bring you. But never fear! ScotRUG is always here for you. Instead we’re bringing you a talk by Kevin Jacoby (ScotRUG co-organizer) on building tooling for irb/pry/the console, with specific gems and interesting examples. So, pop along at 18:00 to CodeBase, and we’ll see you there!

Where and When?

This November, we will be back in CodeBase on Thursday the 14th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The cold breeze tell us one thing, Winter is here. Still, it’s a good time to be in Edinburgh. The Christmas market is almost there, with delicious confort food to make this winter feels a little bit warmer.

Last month we have been looking at JRuby and how it compares to MRI Ruby. This month Will, Software Engineer at FreeAgent, will walk you through metaprogramming in ruby!

Ever wondered what was this obscure force allowing your code to write itself ? Ruby is a great language for Metaprogramming, you probably have used metaprogramming without knowing it. For example when you delegate a method call to a different object using delegate in rails or if you have used the ruby Forwardable module. But don’t worry, if this is completely new to you, no need to be alarmed! It is easier than you think to get started with Metaprogramming and Will is there to demonstrate just that!

ScotRUG welcomes first timers and regular attendees, whether you’re new to the language or not. We’d love to see you there!

—For those who will just come for ScotRUG, someone will be downstairs to let you up. Otherwhise contact us on twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you! layout: post title: Edinburgh, 10th October 2019 - JRuby vs MRI Ruby —

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in October will be in our alternate venue: FreeAgent have offered to host us on Thursday the 10th, at 18:00. That’s in their Edinburgh offices on Fountainbridge.

The 10th will be special! FreeAgent will be showing a talk from Inclusive Design 24. The talk will start at 17:00 and you are more than welcome to come along. ScotRUG will start at 18.00 as usual.

If you arrive early for the Inclusive Design, you can enter the building and sign in at reception, then ask to be let up to FreeAgent. For those who will just come for ScotRUG, someone will be downstairs to let you up. Otherwise contact us on twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The wind is blowing, snow is forecast on the hilltops and the sun is fast disappearing. Winter is coming. Still, it’s a good time to be in Edinburgh. The winter festival to look forward to, Samhuin to enjoy and the best local food.

Last month we went over Ruby MRI, how the underlying C code looks. This week we will be looking at JRuby and how it compares to MRI Ruby. There is a great talk from Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo which we will be watching. Let’s see where that brings us! ScotRUG welcomes first timers and regular attendees, whether you’re new to the language or not. We’d love to see you there!

Where and When?

For our September meeting, we will be back in CodeBase on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Summer is putting up a valiant fight, but it feels like autumn is winning. The festival season over, and we’ve at least had a few days of our traditionally sunnier and warmer September days. But the nights are getting cold, and round the corner comes heartier meals and leaves falling off of trees.

Have you ever wondered how Ruby actually works? You’re likely running CRuby/MRI, which is largely written in C. That might sound intimidating, especially if you’ve actually written C before! So Kevin, your host, will lead you through how to download the Ruby 2.7 and show you how you can use existing Ruby knowledge to see how it’s working. Then we can make a change to it and build your very own Ruby. Along the way, he’ll talk about what new features currently exist in Ruby 2.7, and what we might look forward to when it is released.

As always, CodeBase has water available from their kitchen to keep you hydrated. We’re a friendly bunch of folks and if it’s your first time or your fourth year coming along, you’ll be most welcome! See you there then? Wonderful.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in July will be in our alternate venue: FreeAgent have offered to host us on Thursday the 11th, at 18:00. That’s in their Edinburgh offices on Fountainbridge.

When you arrive someone waiting for you in reception who can let you up to the right floor. If you arrive before 18:00 and no one is around, wait a minute or two and someone will come and get you. Otherwise contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Summer’s here! The rain is falling and the temperature is up at a giddying 18 degrees. Tourists are filling the streets, shops and restaurants and you can hear the city gearing up for the Summer Festivals. Those seats by the castle are looking more solid by the day.

In the last few months we’ve watched a few talks from various conferences, so this month we’re going to dive back into an activity we haven’t touched in years: code reading! There’s much to be learned by diving into a small Ruby class; last time we did this we had a look at the OpenStruct code in Ruby’s standard library. We have a few suggestions lined up, but if you’ve got a small, open source, Ruby project in mind that you’d like to dive into, feel free to come along to the meetup and suggest it.

ScotRUG welcomes first timers and regular attendees, whether you’re new to the language or not. We’d love to see you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in May will be in different venue to usual. FreeAgent have offered to host us on Thursday the 9th, at 18:00. That’s in their Edinburgh offices on Fountainbridge.

When you arrive there will be small A4 signs printed up around the door, and someone waiting for you in reception who can let you up to the right floor. If you arrive before 18:00 and no one is around, wait a minute or two and someone will come and get you. Otherwise contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The North wind is blowing, and it’s making May cold. As the traditional early Edinburgh summer is delayed somewhat, other events continue apace. Tradfest comes to an end, whilst Imaginate Festival starts up. All exploring the mix of tradition and imagination that marks creativity.

In the last month, we’ve had two large annual Ruby conferences take place, with plenty of excitement. The first was RubyKaigi in Fukuoka, with exciting announcements on Sorbet and Ruby 3. The second was RailsConf, where for the first time in a while the new Rails version wasn’t quite announced.

However, individual talks from neither of those events are unavailable so instead we’re going to be showing a talk from last year’s RailsConf, on using GraphQL in Ruby to power an API. Let’s watch someone outline another tool to have in your Ruby toolbelt, and then discuss it afterwards.

As always, ScotRUG meetings are welcoming to all comers, first timers or regular attendees, new to the language or not. See you there then? Wonderful.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in April will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 11th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Look! Spring is here! Sunshine and rain, cold wind and the Edinburgh Science festival. Ain’t April grand? In the spirit of the Science Festival and exploring ideas…

A few months ago, Kent Beck suggested a programming flow exercise that he dubbed “test && commit || revert”. Kent is known as one of the originators of Extreme Programming, and enjoys experimenting with programming flow. test && commit || revert pushes the idea of how small you could make a commit, and also always supporting it with tests.

So this evening, we’ll run a wee workshop and experiment with this style. At the end, we can compare notes. What do we like? What don’t we like? What would we try differently next time? Come along with a computer (or indeed be willing to pair up) and we can toy around with some Ruby code.

As always, CodeBase has water available from their kitchen to keep you hydrated. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and if it’s your first time or your fourth year coming along, you’ll be most welcome! See you there then? Smashing.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in February will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 14th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The days are getting noticeably longer and we’re having bursts of incredible cold and then gusts of wind. It must be February, but the smell of spring in the air is tantalizing.

When debugging a problem with your program, the sensible thing to think is that it’s usually your code that’s at fault. Not the libraries you are using, and certainly not the language or compiler. Well, Alyssa Ross is coming to talk to us about what happens when think it might actually be the tool’s fault after all. She currently works at FreeAgent, and this talk will help you with: what to do when Ruby tells you “You may have encountered a bug in the Ruby interpreter or extension libraries”?

As always, CodeBase has water available from their kitchen to keep you hydrated. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and if it’s your first time or your fourth year coming along, you’ll be most welcome! See you there then? Smashing.

Where and When?

Our first Edinburgh meeting of the year will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 10th of January at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors. Be careful here! “Code Clan” are right next door, but that’s not where we are!

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

2019! Ruby 2.6! RailsConf Call for Proposals is open! I mean. Goodness. The days are getting lighter, though they will certainly get colder. What I’m saying is: there’s stuff going on.

This time of year can be a little slow as the year ramps up. To reflect this, it’ll be a gentle meetup tomorrow. James will work through a live example of getting Stimulus.js set up on a new Rails 5 project, and we can work through it together.

CodeBase has water available from their kitchen, or feel free to bring your own drinks or snacks. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our final Edinburgh meeting of the year will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 13th of December at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Another year draws to a close. Natural light is now a fleeting thing, but the nights make up for it with decorations, subtle sparkles and gigantic spinning neon rides on Princes Street.

Come Christmas, the Ruby core team will deliver us a lovely present: a new Ruby release! If you’re counting, this year’s will be 2.6. So it’s probably worth having a look around the Ruby world at what’s happening. James will kick off the meet up with a few points on the current state of Ruby, from pulling the Standard Library into gems, to Sorbet’s type checking. Then we can talk about whatever we like! So, whether you are brand new to Ruby, or you have something you’re interested in exploring, come along and let’s have a chat.

CodeBase has water available from their kitchen, or feel free to bring your own drinks or snacks. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in October will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 11th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Changeable weather, diminishing light and hours jumping back and forth. October is a month of contrasts. After having an excellent talk last month on a useful programming tool written in Ruby, it makes sense for us to look at one of the many tools that help us to write Ruby.

Visual Studio Code has been around for a few years, and is very well known and used in the JavaScript world. James Bell will give a brief introduction to VS Code, how you can set it up for Ruby use and one or two of its more powerful features. Bring along a laptop if you can, and we can run a wee workshop on getting it set up and having a play around.

CodeBase has water available from their kitchen, or feel free to bring your own drinks or snacks. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in September will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 13th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

It’s September, and ScotRUG is back in Edinburgh! Hopefully August brought you what you were looking for, along with a delightful splash of theatre, music, books, comedy or poetry. As the tourists drift away and the city puts on its usual lovely September display, we can start to enjoy the onset of autumn; delicious vegetables, warm sunshine and cool evenings await us. As is true at any time of year, gathering people around shared interests seems good right now. So, on that note:

This month, Dave Jones is coming to speak to us about a gem he’s built. Picture the situation: you’ve spent time at work crafting a perfect configuration for your editor of choice. You realise there’s some programming thing you want to play with at home over the weekend, but you haven’t updated your configuration at home in months. If you’ve ever tried to copy settings you’ve careful crafted on one computer to another, you’ll recognize the problems here. Do you email them to yourself? Commit them to a version control system you have access to in both places? Ah, but how do you configure your access to the version control system?

Dave decided that he wanted an easier way and a better way, so he built it. His solution may help you, and may also be the inspiration you need to write a tool to solve a problem you’ve been having. Seems good all around no?

As usual, we’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or you’re a repeated visitor. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in July will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

What a summer we’re having. July is usually one of the two rainest months in Edinburgh, and instead we’ve been treated to sunshine, warm weather and pleasent weekends along with the usual influx of people. There’s also plenty going on: the Jazz and Blues Festival is kicking off shortly, the summer festivals have released their programmes (including Turing Fest, and further afield, sporsts are happening. Wimbledon is ramping up to Finals weekend, the Tour de France is spinning through Brittany and there’s some Football World Cup stuff going on too. What a collection of things to watch!

This month, we’re back to basics. The thing that sustains any meetup is, well meeting up. It’s the people that make the community, so lets gather as people have as long as we’ve been able to communicate. What are you working on? Have you encountered problems you’d like to talk about? Did you hear about something new you’d like to share, or ask if others have experience of? Are there things you’d like ScotRUG to do or be? Awesome! Bring your ideas!

As usual, we’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, probably with some seasonal berries. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in June will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 14th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Summer has arrived. The sun is out reasonably often, average temperatures have reached the heady mid-teens, and the cranes are out at Edinburgh castle, building the scaffolding for August and the Tattoo. In British Ruby-land, one of the most important things happening is Brighton Ruby, which takes place in just under a month.

Here in Edinburgh, we’ve got a talk for this month’s meetup. Dave Evans, currently of FreeAgent, is a data scientist and ex particle physicist. He’s coming to talk to us on “The Cargo Cult of the South Seas”. Here’s a taster:

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, probably with some seasonal berries. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in May will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 10th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

May, tends to be a cloud-light, summer-like wonderland in Edinburgh. Warm out of the wind, long bright days and delicious spring vegetables all across the piece. We’ve had two Ruby conferences in the UK so far this year, with one more to come: Brighton Ruby! Tickets are available.

This month, Alberto Fernández-Capel is coming to talk to us about “Economics and Software Development”. As economics is the study of how people produce and consume goods and services, from food to art, it’s a great lens to study what we do.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and stave off the cold. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of humans, and as always newcomers and old timers are equally welcome.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in April will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 11th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. This month the receptionist won’t be present, so please wait for a few minutes to see if someone will come out to let you in! If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

April showers bring, well, cloud and rain. Though it’s cold right now, the promise of higher temperatures is strong, and the floral expectation for May is high. The Science Festival is in its last week, with all kinds of lectures and hands on experiments, and on the edges of it all, ScotRUG.

This month, T.J. Sheehy is going to lead a Lean Coffee session, where everyone present has the chance to create topics to talk about and then, well, talk about them.. So, if there’s something you’ve been mulling over, from how can we use concerns in Rails, to what ethical considerations are there when building software, bring ‘em along. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in March will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 8th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. This month the receptionist won’t be present, so please wait for a few minutes to see if someone will come out to let you in! If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

After snow storms, sunshine. Meterological spring is finally here, though there’s still heavy snow on the Pentlands and in higher portions of Edinburgh. However, the spring warmth of sunshine can be felt during the days (through windows naturally). However, I was certainly inside more than outside over the last week, curled up in the evening reading a book.

Reading is what we’re going to be doing this month! Reading someone else’s code can be a very valuable way of learning things. In the past we’ve read OpenStruct source, learning a good few things along the way. Saron Yitbarak presented on this at RailsConf a few years back, and that presentation is worth a watch.

We’ll take a similar approach to that this month, looking over a small code file to understand how it’s working. The plan is to look at the code that powers the Rails stats command.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and stave off the cold. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of people and newcomers are most welcome! See you there? Great!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in February will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 8th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The days are getting longer, though also colder. February is that trickiest of months; not darkest, but still overwhelmingly night. It’s cold too, and since the natural growing season has been so long delayed, the fresh food from local sources is reduced. However, the year is unfurling! Three Ruby conferences are scheduled for the UK, and the promise of spring is tantalizing.

Spring reminds me of the tradition of spring cleaning. You can open your house/flat/office again to the outside world, meaning you can give everything a proper rinse, polish, shine and soak. Refactoring code is a little bit like cleaning your code, getting it into shape to be easier to use over the next while. Ashley Ellis Pierce works at Github and in November presented on Git Driven Refactoring to RubyConf. We’re going to show the video at ScotRUG this month! If you’re curious about refactoring, what SOLID even is, and how git might help, then this is for you. Likewise, if you’ve already seen the video but wanted to discuss it and related topics with other people, come along!

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and stave off the cold. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of people and newcomers are most welcome! See you there? Great!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in January will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

It’s 2018! The millenium bug(s) that were largely successfully dealt with would now be of legal drinking age! January is a strange month, both promising renewal and reflection and softening you up for the harsh February weather. ScotRUG this month is here to help you through. This month we have no speaker, so will instead engage in our January tradition of Lean Coffee.

Lean Coffee is a way of generating topics to talk about, without requiring that you a) know anyone or b) be the biggest personality in the room. If there’s a topic you’ve wanted to chat about from user experience research to new Christmas release of Ruby 2.5, this seems like a good time. We’ll supply sticky notes and some kind of writing material, you bring the ideas. As per usual, snacks will be supplied to pull you through to dinner. We’re looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in December will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 14th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Ice rinks, mulled wine, sub-zero temperatures and gaudy lights. Winter conjures flashes of memories, and promises to lay down new ones as midwinter approaches. Reflections, refractions, plans and dreams.

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. It was born of the dream to easily manage the software that Apple didn’t provide in an extensible and maintainable way. Over the course of the life of the project it has be come the de facto way for software developers using MacOS to do this. It is also almost entirely written in Ruby.

Have you ever wanted to know what it’s like writing command line applications in Ruby? Or what it’s like to work on a popular open source project? Or how to get involved in such an endeavour? Alyssa Ross is one of the core maintainers of Homebrew, and lives right here in Edinburgh. We’re lucky enough to have her come speak to us about Homebrew and I’m sure will be happy to take questions at the end.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome! See you there then? Smashing.

Hey you wonderful humans! This month (November 2017), ScotRUG is taking a breather. The organisers have a clash of commitments, and so we’re unable to run. If you’re looking to fill your meetup needs, there are lots of other good meetups in Edinburgh. Try OpenTechCalendar for a list.

We’ll see you next month though, for potential social frolics on ice, as well as a talk. Right? Right! Enjoy your Novembers.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in October will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The light is fading, the nights are cool to cold and autumn vegetables are bountiful. October in Edinburgh marks the start of big coats and warming meals, with the old festival of Samhuinn celebrating the traditional start of winter: fire and feasting.

So, how best to represent this in a Ruby sort of way? Well, the humans of Digital Ocean like to mark the month with the Bavarian inspired Hacktoberfest. From their website: Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software in partnership with Github. In short, a number of contributions will not only yield you gratitude from the project and the community, but it will also net you a sweet t-shirt.

The motivation here is to encourage people to contribute to open source over the course of the month. You can be entirely new to programming, or someone with years of experience, but the point is: the open source community values your input. Contributing can be anything from writing blog posts to building a whole new open source project. Here, Digital Ocean and Github are specifically tracking: writing documentation, raising bugs, working on fixes or working on new features for open source projects. Even with all the material available online, this can feel daunting to achieve by yourself. So, let’s work on it together!

We’ll start the evening with a brief introduction to open source, followed by a list of potential projects that would like your help. People who have contributed to open source before will be around to offer advice, and together we can work on getting your first contribution underway. Some of the projects looking for help may even be things you use regularly! All you’ll need to bring is a touch of enthusiasm, and either a laptop or the happiness to pair up with someone who has one.

To get yourself motivated have a look at: How to Contribute to Open Source. If you’re not a Ruby programmer but are interested anyway, come along! The open source community is bigger than any one technology.

See you on Thursday!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in September will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 14th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Sunshine, calmer wind and fewer midges. With the exception of the slow fading of light, September is a glorious month in Scotland. With Edinburgh recovering from the summer fesivals, it’s a good time to be out and about. The last of the comfortable hillwalking for the year, sitting in the slow afternoon sunshine next to a fine island beach, or the gentle bubbling away of a solution to a problem whilst visiting a botanical garden. The possibilities!

Speaking of solutions to problems, Brian Swan is coming to talk to us about refactoring code this month. Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behaviour. It’s frequently used to make it easier to alter a program when it isn’t immediately clear where you can change it. However, it can be hard to make the leap from understanding how to refactor a small class or function to understand how to refactor a larger system in a big codebase.

Brian has worked a number of companies with large codebases, including currently at FreeAgent. These Jumbo Refactors can be challenging, and are always educational, so we can look forward to some strong lessons this month.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in August will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 10th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

August! The rain is still here, but there is usually the backup of warmth to go with it. A place alive with people, gawping and gaping, working out how to understand a 3D space with a 2D map. In the middle of almost every night, fireworks flare over the old town, and those impossible hang-over seats that have been building up since late May are finally in use in the castle car park. Yep, the festivals are here.

What with all this clamour and well practiced performers, this month we’re going to hold a more relaxed meetup. Bring along what you’re working on: a problem in a tutorial you’re picking through, some open source project you contribute to, or want to contribute to, or something you’d like to explore. There will be people to share with, folk who will be able to help out. Or indeed bring nothing, and we can just chat about things Ruby and Ruby adjacent.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in July will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 13th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

July: the odd month of the summer in Edinburgh. Usually the rainiest, the city none-the-less hums with activity in the build up to the Festival and the Fringe. There’s that flurry of other festivals: Film, Magic, Jazz & Blues and the start of the Art Festivals that get underway, and the seating for the Tattoo finally gets finished up, clinging to the edge of the Castle.

This month, we have a short talk from Eva Koleli: An Introduction to Arel. Eva works at FreeAgent, and uses Rails and ActiveRecord there to interact with their database. She’s had cause to jump down a level of abstraction from ActiveRecord to Arel before, and thinks we all might benefit from adding this tool to our Ruby toolbelt. After the talk, Eva will be running a workshop, providing a toy database to help you play around with Arel directly.

When all that is done, there will be plenty of time for questions and for general chat. We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in May will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 8th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Summer is here! Well, at least summer was here. We seem to been in a bit of an autumnal taster over the last few days. Nevertheless, the temperature is up, the Film Festival is on the horizon, and seasonal allergies have shown up. Both the good and the bad eh?

This month, James Bell will be walking us through a bit of computer history, based on the experiences of a single programmer. In “What Steve Can Teach Us”, he explores understanding the past, and how that can help inform the present and the future.

As usual, we’ll supply some snacks to help get your stomach through to dinner. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen but feel free to bring along your own juice or water to keep you hydrated. ScotRUGgers are a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome. Hopefully, we’ll see some of you there.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in May will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 11th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

This far into spring brings plenty of interest. The weather has provided a warm glow, the rattle and hum of barbeques being fired up for the first time. Birds perch in trees, having thoroughly practiced their material. In the city, TradFest has been and gone and the smell of summer is on the horizon. In the Ruby world, RailsConf also took place a few weeks ago, and the videos have started to appear. Another web framework, Hanami, has gone 1.0.

So there’s plenty to talk about. To help facilitate talking in and around Ruby, we’re going to run it Lean Coffee style to talk about whatever comes up! Lean Coffee is a way of generating topics to talk about, without requiring that you a) know anyone or b) be the biggest personality in the room. If there’s a topic you’ve been wanting to discuss in a less formal setting, bring it along! We’ll supply sticky notes and pens and we can go from there.

There will be a modest supply of snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in April will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 13th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

April in Edinburgh is a glorious month. The Science Festival is on, joined with the traditional first burst of warmth in the year and the arrival of spring food. What a great time for new experiences and for experimentation.

Scott Riley works at Cultivate, and is coming to give us a talk about working with high volume Postgres databases in Rails. Working in web frameworks that ship with Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs) like Active Record can sometimes blunt our appreciation for what’s going on at the storage layer. Here’s an opportunity to sharpen up our understanding of the interaction, also to think about what we might need to change when the volume is turned up.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in March will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 9th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

March means that spring has arrived. The days are no longer interrupted by incredible stretches of darkness; there’s more light in the world. Wee white and yellow buds start to poke their heads above the ground, marking the return of brighter colours to the natural world. Renewal, and new beginnings.

Heather Burns is a digital law specialist. She spends her work time trying to bridge the gap between digital policy makers and those who are are designing and developing web things that are impacted by such policies. The things you do online, from sending messages to friends on WhatsApp to starting a new business, are impacted by the decisions of people at local, regional and global levels. Understanding current law and pending law can help inform the choices you need to make as to where you store your data, and what you need to say to your local representatives.

Heather has kindly agreed to come and speak to us and share some thoughts on the current state of digital law. Given the pending policital and legal changes, she’s decided to give a talk called “Brexit for Geeks”. As usual, there will be plenty of time for questions afterwards.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen but feel free to bring along your own juice or water. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome. See some of you there?

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in January will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 9th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors outside reception.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

February is an odd month. Spiced breads and weirdly hollow chocolate can be sensed at the end of the month, but the uncertain transition towards spring is at its messiest early on. The ghost of January is passed, when we met and talked about all manner of things. Paul put together a summary if you’d like a flavour.

Something that had come up at a previous meeting but wasn’t discussed in January is the subject of test doubles. What are they? What different flavours are there? When should you use them? Does it even matter?

At RubyConf in November, Noel Rappin gave a talk on this subject. So we’re going to show the talk, and then discuss it afterwards. Of course, this will also be a time to talk about anything else you’d like.

In a change to the regular occurrence, there will be some snacks. I think CodeBase also has water available, but feel free to bring along your own juice or water. As always, we’re a friendly bunch and newcomers as well as folk who have been before would be most welcome. See you on Thursday!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in January will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 12th, at 18:00. That’s in their shiny building on Castle Terrace.

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors outside reception.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Well looky here, the days are getting longer. They are getting colder too, but let’s focus on the positives. The mind is an odd thing, making days feel longer as more sunlight fills the hours. This month at the ScotRUG meetup, we’re going to fill our hours by talking. We’re going to run a Lean Coffee style meeting, to talk about whatever comes up!

Lean Coffee is a way of generating topics to talk about, without requiring that you a) know anyone or b) be the biggest personality in the room. If there’s a topic you’ve been wanting to discuss in a less formal setting, bring it along! We’ll supply sticky notes and pens and we can go from there. We’re looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in December will be in CodeBase on Thursday the 8th, at 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny building on Castle Terrace.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

December is upon us! Edinburgh is a city ablaze with lights at night, the smell of wood cabins crowded in Princes Street gardens compliments the noise of the crowds. Around St Andrew’s Square there’s an ice rink for young and old, where experienced skaters help the less experienced, and folk come together. Meanwhile preparations for various numbers of mid-winter celebrations continue, gathering together communities.

In the monthly bringing together of the Ruby community in Edinburgh, we’re lucky to have Greg Sutcliffe coming to speak. Greg is the community lead for The Foreman project, RedHat’s open source server management tool written in Ruby. Greg started out as a Foreman user, using it as a day to day tool to get server management done. His participation within Foreman eventually led him to being hired by RedHat. Fostering community is a challenge, and is an important part of building software, and I’m looking forward to what he has to say.

They’ll be time for questions afterwards, and we’ll likely decamp somewhere close to CodeBase for food when the meetup finishes. See some of you there? Excellent.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in October will be in CodeBase at 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny building on Castle Terrace. The old entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”, and a glorious view of the castle.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

October has arrived, and with it, the soft early autumn fades away. The balance of day/night is tilting firmly to night, and though we haven’t reached Samhuinn yet, the spirit of community pervades things. In that spirit, this month’s meetup will be a hack night. Come out, meet some Ruby folk, and work on some personal projects.

Feel free to bring along something you’re stuck on, something you want to get started with, or something you want to show off! There will be people around willing to help out, or happy to fawn over your latest creation. See you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in September will be in CodeBase at the totally normal time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”, and a glorious view of the castle.

The room for the meeting hasn’t been confirmed yet. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

When you first approach a new programming language, be it Ruby, JavaScript or Elm, one of the quickest ways to get a feeling for it is to quickly fire up an interactive console and play around. Getting there can be awkward, since you have to install the language tools first. Well, Jingkai He has been working on a way to fix that. He’s going to talk us through Koderunr, a project of his that allows you to send and write programs in different languages, either via a web page or via a console, without having to install the language tools yourself.

There will be plenty of time for questions afterwards! We look forward to seeing you all, first-timers or regulars, on Thursday.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in August will kick off in CodeBase at the by now banal time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”.

Our room hasn’t been confirmed yet. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

It’s August, so the festivals will be in full swing. So much music, theatre, circus, comedy and spoken word in one place! It’s also that time in the four year cycle when the Olympics are on. In homage to both these events, we thought it was time for another code kata. A code kata is a small contained programming problem. The idea is that once you’ve finished it, you can try and solve it over and over again, with your familiarity with the problem allowing you to experiment with different approaches.

We last undertook a kata in May, counting lines of Java code. If you’ve got solutions to this you’ve had a play with in the meantime, bring them along! If you haven’t that’s good too!

We’ll be trying something different this month, and as always it should be beginner friendly. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in July will kick off in CodeBase at the increasingly normal time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny redeveloped building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”. This is the new entrance!

Our room hasn’t been confirmed yet, but we’ll update the site with details when we know for sure. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

A couple of years ago, we spent a meetup reading the source code of Ruby’s OpenStruct class. In our efforts to understand what was going on, we ended up learning about Singleton classes, hash references and symbol table misses. We investigated related code and played around with how we might implement the code differently. It’s been a while, and the blowy winds of change make July feel like a good time to gain insight from how other folk solve problems.

We’ll pick a small project via the mailing list, then spend the meetup collaboratively going over it. We look forward to seeing you there! If it’s your first time coming along, we’d love to see you! We’re a friendly bunch with lots of different levels of experience and backgrounds.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in June will kick off in CodeBase at our new(ish) time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny redeveloped building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”. This is the new entrance!

Our room hasn’t been confirmed yet, but we’ll update the site with details when we know for sure. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

RailsConf rolled into Kansas City in May for three days of chatting Rails and Ruby. Kansas is a fair way from Edinburgh, so to mark the occasion we’ll show a 30 minute talk from the last day of the conference. Picking up a thread from last month, this is all about unpacking the magic of building a testing framework, from the creator of MiniTest, Ryan Davis (the framework we used last month). This sounds intimidating at first, but getting the basics together is surprisingly understandable.

General chat and presumably more specific testing chat is sure to follow. We look forward to seeing you there! If it’s your first time coming along, we’d love to see you! We’re a friendly bunch with lots of different levels of experience and backgrounds.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in May will kick off in CodeBase at an all new time of 18:00. That’s in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street.

There will be a blackboard up in reception with these details too. Take the lift to ‘L’, and we’ll meet in the area around the lifts; the room itself is through a locked door. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

This month, we’re going to be running a coding kata. A kata is a small contained problem, designed to be easy to understand. The idea is that you can experiment with new approaches over short periods of time.

We’ll be using a style common to code dojos. Which is to say we’ll work through the same small problem in pairs. Each pair will work on the problem for 20 minutes, then take a break, then switch partners. After three rotations, we’ll finish up by talking about and (optionally) presenting the different developed solutions.

Come along to Saramago in the CCA at 18:30 on Thursday 5 May, for questions and chat about writing software in Ruby. We will be at a table in the upstairs bar like last month (not the café downstairs, where we’ve been previously.)

This may be the last Glasgow meetup for a while as David will be away at the beginning of June, and possibly beyond. If you (yes, you!) want to keep the meetup going, drop me a message and I’ll set you up with everything you need as an organizer.

There’ll be a Lean Coffee session at CodeBase

As usual, we’ll kick off in CodeBase at 19:30. That’s in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Head up to Floor L and we’ll be in the Nor’ Loch room.

Update

Venue change: 19:30 at the Beehive Inn on Grassmarket. We will tweet photos of our exact location and faces on the ScotRUG Twitter.

Update: due to absentmindedness I have only just learned that there is an exhibition on tonight at the CCA, so we will not get the usual table at the downstairs café. The meetup is going ahead, and I will try to get a corner of the upstairs bar (also part of the Saramago), but if that is also busy we may need to move to a nearby pub or café.

I’m so sorry! Especially if you have decided to come along based solely on the vegan pizza which I foolishly promised.

If you are coming to the meetup and haven’t yet RSVP’d, please send me a quick email or tweet me so I can send out any last minute updates.

—David

Original post:

Get your monthly fix of Ruby help, advice and chat on Thursday 7 April at 18:30 in the CCA Saramago Café!

We’ll be drinking Lean Coffee in deference to tradition, but there will also be teas, cold drinks and vegan pizzas available from the bar. Imitation Postits and Sharpies to scribble down discussion topics will be provided by the organizer.

If you want to get in touch with David (the “organizer”) for any reason at all, you can do so on Twitter, Meetup or by email. There are more details and maps on the Meetup and OpenTechCalendar event pages.

Following on from the success of last month’s Koan’s meeting, we’re extending it to March. The plan is to run through some more Koans, and also look out for Ruby 2.0+ features to add.

As usual, we’ll kick off in CodeBase at 19:30. That’s in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Head up to Floor L and we’ll be in the Nor’ Loch room.

Head over to the CCA Saramago Café on Thursday 3 March at 18:30 for a drink and a chat about Ruby, Rails and web development.

There’ll be the usual Lean Coffee discussion, we’ll take a look at some of the new stuff coming up in Rails 5, and this month we’ll also have a go at tackling a few problems from the exercism.io Ruby track, so bring a laptop if you like.

Get in touch with David on Twitter, Meetup or by email with any questions, or if you need directions to the venue. There is more information and maps on the Meetup and OpenTechCalendar event pages.

See you there!

This Thursday’s Edinburgh meeting is on the eve of Jim Weirich’s anniversary. Given Jim’s fondness for visiting Edinburgh, and that we haven’t had a programming session for a while, we will be dedicating the evening to Ruby Koans.

In pairs, we will choose a section of Koans to run through. We’ll discuss what we’ve learnt.

As the Koans haven’t really been updated for a while, we will also try and identify newer (2.x +) concepts to add. Perhaps we could make these the subject of some subsequent meetings.

As usual, we’ll kick off in CodeBase at 19:30. That’s in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Head up to Floor L and we’ll be in the Nor Loch room.

We are meeting up in Glasgow this week for another Lean Coffee discussion on all things Ruby!

We’ll start the evening around 18:30 on Thursday 4 February in Saramago Café at the CCA. More details and a map to the venue are available over on Open Tech Calendar.

We’re going to use the Lean Coffee format again this month to discuss Ruby topics.

We’ll kick off in CodeBase at 19:30. That’s in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street

Head up to Floor L and we’ll be in the Nor Loch room.

We are meeting up for the first time this year from 18:30 on Thursday 7 January at the CCA. Details and a map to the venue are on the Open Tech Calendar event page.

We’ll find a table in the courtyard café downstairs, on the right past the shop as you walk in from the Sauchiehall Street entrance. See you there!

Following on from a suggestion at last month’s Lean Coffee, we’re going to watch a recording of the talk Nothing is Something by Sandi Metz.

We’ll have a discussion afterwards.

We’ll be in CodeBase from 19:30. Head up to Floor L and we’ll be in the Nor Loch room.

Come along to tictoc’s office on Newton Terrace (directions) on Thursday, 3 December at 18:30 for the next Glasgow Ruby meetup!

We’ll use Lean Coffee to lead the conversation again, which means plenty of opportunity to ask questions, share ideas, and take part in some lively discussion.

We’re in a better location for practical stuff this month, so bring along a laptop if you would like to try some exercises, get help with something specific, or show off some code.

We’ll me doing a Lean Coffee format at this meetup so we’ll be having discussions on whatever people want to talk about.

We’ll be in CodeBase from 19:30. Head up to Floor L and we’ll be in the Nor Loch room.

Thursday 5 November 2015 marks the return of regular Ruby meetings to Glasgow!

This month we will be at the CCA Saramango Café Bar on Sauchiehall Street from 19:00.

As this is the first Glasgow meetup for a while, this will be a chance to talk Ruby with new and seasoned developers, get to know the local Ruby community, and decide on what we want to get from future meetings.

We are going to do lightning talks this Thursday. If there’s a topic you’d like to talk about or something interesting you’d like to show, then come along and share it!

The meeting will take place in CodeBase at 19:30. We’ll be in the Blackford Board Room, on Floor M.

See (/join) the discussion in the ScotRUG Google Group for details.

This workshop will be led by James Bell, aiming to help both current developers who use open source software on a regular basis to make their first contributions back, and also to encourage anyone newer to see how easy it is.

The meeting will be in CodeBase, in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Start will be at 19:30, 20/08/2015; it will be in the Burgh Loch meeting room on floor L. This is the opposite wing to the normal Event Space.

We have a special guest star for August’s Edinburgh meeting, on Thursday 20 August. Austin Ziegler will be talking about Rails deployment with Ansible.

Austin says

We deploy our Rails applications with Ansible. I can cover what we do in Ansible—with a brief introduction on Ansible—but I can also talk about our slug builder for Ansible-based deploys, Cartage

The meeting will be in CodeBase, in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Start will be at 19:30, 20/08/2015; signs will guide you to the correct place, but it will probably be the Event Space on Floor L.

We will be taking a look at Web development using the Phoenix web framework for Elixir and also Go. Presentations by Paul Wilson and Colin Gemmell

As FreeAgent are moving offices, we will be (at least for now) moving to CodeBase, in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street.

Update. We will be in the Event Space on Floor L (penultimate floor). We will try and get a sign to guide you.

This month’s meeting will be at 19:30 on Thursday 21 May, in a new location. As FreeAgent are moving offices, we will be (at least for now) moving to CodeBase, in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Head to floor M (top floor) and you will be directed to the meeting in the Blackford Hill Meeting room (not actually on Blackford Hill).

This month’s topic will be deploying Rails Apps. What is everyone using to deploy Rails Apps these days (apart from Heroku)? What are the pros, cons, and tips?

Ryan MacGillivray will give a quick lightning talk about using Postgres with Rails. After that we’re going to do some exercises from exercism.io.

Come along and bring your laptop!

It would be nice if you signed up on our Meetup page, though.

Venue

FreeAgent kindly provide the venue and a selection of drinks. See you at 7.30pm at FreeAgent, 40 Torphichen Street, EH3 8JB.

FreeAgent are on the ground floor of this building, which has a massive “40” printed on it.

We’re going to learn something about cryptography by doing some Metasano Crypto Challenges in Ruby from http://cryptopals.com/.

No knowledge of cryptography is needed.

We had a go at some of these in January and people liked it. So we’re going to do some again.

Interested? Just turn up! It would be nice if you signed up on our Meetup page, though.

Venue

FreeAgent kindly provide the venue and beverages. See you at 7.30pm at FreeAgent, 40 Torphichen Street, EH3 8JB.

FreeAgent are on the ground floor of this building, which has a massive “40” printed on it.

This month’s Edinburgh meetup will be on 19th February - on the anniversary of Jim Weirich’s death. Jim lived visiting Edinburgh, generally visiting a few times a year, and we loved having him here.

At Thursday’s ScotRUG we will be remembering Jim by practicing some Ruby Koans, playing some Werewolf, and hopefully a bit of Ukelele playing.

Hope to see you at the usual place, FreeAgent Central, 40 Torphichen Street, EH3 8JB at 19:30. You can sign up at this Meetup group.

It’s going to be an interesting meetup with two speakers so far.

Pets, Cattle and Cloned Sheep

John Daniels will be giving a lightning talk version of “Pets, Cattle and Cloned Sheep” about Docker.

There was alot of discussion about virtualisation at the last meetup, which trickled onto the mailing list, so it’ll be great to hear more about Docker.

At this point you’re probably thinking “Docker sounds really useful, but who in their right mind would trust me to use it?”. Well…

“WHAT’S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN?” - Enabling authentic trust at work

Marc Burgauer will be talking about trust:

Teaser

Trust is the metric that best reflects the quality of our relationships and of our social connections. Without trust, organisational improvements efforts cannot flourish. We reliably find the absence of trust is the cause for teams failing to adopt agile or lean practices successfully. How can trust be developed to support successful adoption?

We’re physically hardwired for connection. Rejection hurts. We get meaning and validation where connection allows us to be authentic. Yet we exist in environments that routinely inform us, that what we do and who we are, is not “Good Enough”. We are shamed into conformity (often masqueraded as improvement) and blamed for failures.

“Management, in most of its incarnations, is an institutionalized form of distrust” say Robert Solomon and Fernando Flores.

This talk explores how we can remain authentic in a blame culture; how we can build authentic trust and enable safe-to-fail environments to strengthen our connections, as well as my own experience applying these practices.

Bio

It’s Marc’s first time at ScotRUG Edinburgh, so here’s an ice-breaker:

Marc Burgauer has experienced professional life as a biologist, an award-winning performance artist and musician, enterprise database architect and early web applications programmer, founder, board member and manager in multiple startups, project manager and coach in multinationals and public services.

Complexity theory defined Marc’s worldview early in life. He quotes Erich Jantsch’s “The Self-organizing Universe” as the pivotal book that he read as a teenager. Marc’s interest in theories about work, including his acclaim of Peter Drucker, was re-ignited when he first adopted XP in 1999.

For the last 15 years, Marc has been keen to test ideas and, as a practitioner, enjoys the application of theories in day-to-day work.

Marc currently focuses his studies on innovation and cultural change while, as a consultant, he encourages organizations to adopt lean and agile practices.

Venue

FreeAgent kindly provide us with a warm venue and a variety of drinks. See you at 7.30pm at FreeAgent, 40 Torphichen Street, EH3 8JB.

You can sign up on Lanyrd so that we can have an idea of numbers.

New to ScotRUG?

ScotRUG is an informal meetup. Different people tend to turn up each month, both regular attendees and new people.

Some people have done alot of Ruby and some people are just curious. If you fall into any of these groups, just come along!

The meeting usually wraps up about 9pm, although sometimes some people head to a nearby tavern afterwards to continue the discussion.

Evan Phoenix gave a keynote at Scottish Ruby Conference this year about Reading Code.

So let’s read some code!

Agenda:

• Come up with a list of gems or projects that we are interested in
• Break off into pairs/groups to dig into one of these
• Summarise what interesting things we found in the end

As we’ll be going through actual code, the more laptops, tablets etc. in the room the better. We’ll be in groups though so if you don’t have anything with you, don’t worry about it.

FreeAgent

Usual time (19:30), great venue (FreeAgent).

sign up on Lanyrd.

June we’re having hardware night in Edinburgh. Let’s get some LEDs blinking, other things.

Topics will include:

• Dan Muncton demonstrating controlling Arduinos with Ruby / Rubuto
• Getting setup with Arduino
• Hardware hacking with the Raspberry PI (James Robertson)
• Making your own “Arduinos”, for £4 or less. Paul Wilson with some Shrimp kits that you can play with.
• Making LEDs flash
• Ruby Arduino gems
• Rubuto

If you’re coming, let us know on Lanyrd. James, Dan, and I will bring in some hardware, but bring in your own jumpers cables, leds, breadboards, etc… if you have them.

It would be great to hear about your hardware projects, too.

There has been alot happening recently, so this month we’ll have a Lean Coffee format http://leancoffee.org/.

If anyone wants to give a lightning talk, we can do these before starting the discussion.

FreeAgent

Usual time (19:30), usual venue (FreeAgent).

sign up on Lanyrd.

This month, James Robertson will give a lightning talk on SimplePubSub. We’ll follow this with a Code Kata exercise.

If anyone else wants to give a lightning talk on the night, then feel free.

FreeAgent

Usual time (19:30), usual venue (FreeAgent).

sign up on Lanyrd.

April in Glasgow will see Colin Gemmell talking about the go language.

Talk Description:

Go faster applications

Ruby is a great programming language to write expressive, easy to read code that has thousands apon thousands of libraries to choose from so you don’t have to write any code.

But Ruby has one major issue, it is slow language and it comes to a point where you need to augment your Ruby code with another languge. Github used Erlang, Twitter used Scala but for me the choice is Go.

In this talk I’ll look at why I’ve Go over other programming languages, what’s been gained, what’s been lost and how you can integrate Go applications with existing Ruby apps.

About Colin

Colin Gemmell is Web/Application Developer from Glasgow, Scotland.

You can find us in the Fuzzy Orange offices at, Pentagon Centre, Unit 313, Glasgow, G3 8AZ

Start time is 6:30 for 7pm, on Thursday the 3rd of April.

Look forward to seeing you there Map

Thanks to Neo and Fuzzy Orange for sponsoring the event.

Remember the to keep up with announcments on Twitter and join the discussion on the mailing list.

This month, we’ll take a look at some solutions people have come up with for the use case below. Those who wish to can implement all or some of this use case and we’ll discuss the approaches, styles and share suggestions.

The use case is from the paper Avatars of TDD.

Use Case

Design a Veterinary Information System for a Clinic. Veterinary medical system is very similar to human medical system with one exception, all the patients are animals. Each patient is owned by a person, who brings the patient to the clinic and pays the bills.

The person in charge for IT department of the clinic gave us the following Use Cases to start development. Dave Atkins brings his pet named Fluffy into the clinic for a routine check up and shots. The veterinarian charges him for the routine office visit and the Rabies vaccination. Dave pays cash before he leaves and is provided with a receipt for the services.

FreeAgent

Usual time (19:30), usual venue (FreeAgent).

sign up on Lanyrd.

We are pleased to announce that Orde Saunders will be speaking about Building for the device agnostic web.

Talk Description:

We can’t control how our users access our websites - they may use mobile phones, TVs, tablets, games consoles, laptops, desktop computers, or even their glasses and their watch! In this world, meeting our customers’ needs on their terms is a daunting task.

About Orde

In 1994 Orde viewed the source of a web page, realised it was just a text file, and thought: “I wonder if I can build a web page?”
Since then he’s built a lot of web pages but is still looking at things on the internet and thinking: “I wonder if I can build something like that?”

You can find us in the Fuzzy Orange offices at, Pentagon Centre, Unit 313, Glasgow, G3 8AZ

Start time is 6:30 for 7pm, on Thursday the 6th of March.

Look forward to seeing you there Map

Thanks to Neo and Fuzzy Orange for sponsoring the event.

Remember the to keep up with announcments on Twitter and join the discussion on the mailing list.

Paul Wilson will give a short talk on writing a small web app with Elixir.

Then we’ll dive into some more Ruby exercises from Exercism.io.

Usual time (19:30), usual place (FreeAgent). sign up on Lanyrd.

Let’s go Code Kata!

January’s meeting we will tackle an Exercism.io Ruby exercise, then we’ll go to the pub.

Usual time (19:30), usual place (FreeAgent). sign up on Lanyrd.

We are very pleased to announce that Ashley Baxter will be speaking about, well…. I’ll let Ashley explain.

Talk Description:

“Finding myself in the sudden position of running an established business at the age of 18, with no prior experience or knowledge of the industry, I share my experience of teaching myself the necessary skills to run a web-based business, learning to code and bringing a web app to market, and trying to steer it in a new direction altogether.”

About Ashley:

“An unusual combination of insurer and photographer, Ashley’s big girl’s job is running insurance broker, Brokers Direct. She has also been known to photograph weddings under the Girl With A Camera alias. Ashley reserves what little time she has for Xbox, weightlifting and convincing people that working in insurance isn’t as mundane as it sounds.”

We seem to have made the Fuzzy Orange offices office our new home and we quite like it. You can find it at, Pentagon Centre, Unit 313, Glasgow, G3 8AZ

Start time is 6:30 for 7pm, on Wednesday the 5th of February.

Look forward to seeing you there Map

Thanks to Neo and Fuzzy Orange for sponsoring the event.

Remember the to keep up with announcments on Twitter and join the discussion on the mailing list.

During the well-attended December meeting in Edinburgh, we decided to hold the pre-Christmas December meeting and host Lightning talks.

Please volunteer on the mailing list, and watch out here and on Twitter for details.

So far we have:

• Paul Wilson: in introduction to Elixir.
• Paul Smith: the different way we’re using cucumber at FreeAgent.
• Irina Bednova: Pry.
• Ryan Stenhouse: ngaj tlhIngan yIjatlh. (A short Klingon talk).
• Iain Broadfoot: Ember.

Join us at FreeAgent for 19:30 for an exciting Edinburgh meetup. First Paul Wilson will give a brief overview of his experience at this year’s RubyConf followed by a discussion on the future of ScotRUG (Edinburgh). Let’s work out the answers to:-

• What do we want out of ScotRUG? Talks, guest speakers, hacking, our own projects?
• What can we do to make it happen?
• What can we put in place to ensure that it keeps happening?

See you there.

Update: Olly has put up a Lanyrd page. Please sign up here.

We are very pleased to announce that Stephen Best (Bestie) will be travelling all the way from London especially to speak to us and as a special treat we’ll be putting on some pizza and refreshments!

Talk Description:

Most of us have heard the vague, hand waving spiel about why DI is important for writing flexible, reusable code, a little harder to come by are examples of how one actually goes about doing it in a (cost) effective manner.

Rather than a dry introduction to DI, this talk will be packed full of code examples demonstrating practical techniques you can start using straight away, no gems, meta-programming or magic required. We’ll also explore how you might persuade your Rails app to benefit from DI.

About Stephen:

Bestie is a London based Ruby / Javascript / XP contractor, committed to software craftsman and OO design obsessive.

This month we have a new venue at the Fuzzy Orange offices, which are at the Pentagon Centre, Unit 313, Glasgow, G3 8AZ

Start time is 6:30 for 7pm.

Look forward to seeing you there Map

Thanks to Neo and Fuzzy Orange for sponsoring the event.

We are very pleased to announce that Matt Wynne will be giving us his Baruco talk ‘Treating objects like people’ on Thursday the 3rd of October!

Description:

We all know it’s wrong to treat people like objects.

Have you ever considered what happens when you design your objects to be treated the same way? In this talk Matt explores the intersection between psychology and OO design.

You’ll leave with some food for thought about how to model the interactions between your objects, as well as how to relate to the people around you.

As always a big thanks to Neo for sponsoring the venue.

See you at SocietyM at 18:30, for a 19:00 start.

This Thursday we will be having a couple of talks at ScotRUG:

• Stephen Best will be talking about Dependency Injection in Ruby
• Brian Swan will be previewing his Lean Agile Scotland talk “Help, my tests are killing me.” This talk will examine the characteristics of readability in tests and offer advice on making your tests more readable.

We’ll be back at our usual Edinburgh haunt of FreeAgent Towers in July for a series of fun-fun lightning talks.

John Daniels will be talking to us about private clouds.

Ryan Stenhouse will be talking about Twillio.

Michael Carruthers will be talking about DTrace and Ruby.

There’s still a couple of slots left if anyone else wants to speak, just hit up the mailing list.

See you all there at 1930!

July’s Glasgow ScotRUG is going to be a slightly different format from ususal. If you’ve been along to a LeanAgileGlasgow meetup it will be very familiar.

We are going to borrow the LeanCoffee format where we have an informal discussion around the subjects attendees are most interested in.

Hope to see you upstairs from 6:30pm onwards in the Crystal Palace, 36 Jamaica St, Glasgow G1 4QD.

The plan once again this month is to have a small pub meetup - regular service will resume next month!

We’re going to meet a Bert’s Bar for a bit of a change.

Here’s a map to it.

With all the excitement of the Scottish Ruby Confererence just behind us, it’s a quiet pub meetup this month. See you all at The Haymarket at 19:30. The pub is here.

April’s Edinburgh meeting kicks off with a quick run-through of Ruby 2.0 by Paul Wilson. After the support act comes the main show: Phil Roberts is giving a preview of his Realtime Conf EU and Scotland JS talk on Bacon JS.

Usual place (FreeAgent), usual time (19:30).

For March, Joe Wright what he has learned over the last 6 months.

Joe likes to think about how and why he does things, he doesn’t always understand what he’s doing, but he’s good at looking competent. Come to ScotRUG to hear about what Joe learned over the last 6 months about SOLID, Git, regex and tooling choice while moving from looking competent to finally getting it.

18:30, for 19:00 start at the SocietyM

As always a big thanks to Neo for sponsoring the venue.

As suggested by Iain Watt, this month will be all about mob rule. The general idea is that we all work on the same piece of code together. We’ll pick a kata or some such that we can get our teeth into and see how we go. The aim is more to see how others attack a problem rather than to have something finished and working.

If anyone has any ideas on what problem/kata/Ruby quiz we could have a go at, please email the google group

For March, Ryan Stenhouse will regale us with marvellous tales of reading and writing PDFs in Ruby. There will be excitement. There will be laughter. There will be embedded fonts (I imagine).

By popular demand, February’s ScotRUG is all about the codez. As discussed at last month’s meeting, many people are coding projects in isolation and others want to get an outside look. Bring your code along for constructive ideas on how it might be better and advice on those tricky problems.

All discussion will be under FriendDA terms. Usual place (FreeAgent), usual time (19:30).

In February we are very luck to have Graeme bringing his successful Server-sent Events talk to Glasgow. In the talk Graeme will discuss connecting your browser to your message queue with Server-sent events, which are simpler than Websockets but unidirectional.

18:30, for 19:00 start at the SocietyM

See you in February

Graeme is giving a talk on connecting your browser to your message queue with Server-sent events, which are simpler than Websockets but unidirectional.

19:30 start at the FreeAgent offices, 40 Torphichen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8JB. Nibbles and drinks kindly supplied by FreeAgent.

Update: Video of the talk.

Mathie’s Server-sent Events

No matter what they tell you, it’s always a people problem- Jerry Weinberg

November’s ScotRUG will be a slight departure from our normal technial diet. Well-known Rubyist and New Context Regional Director, Joe O’Brien will take us on a deep exploration of one or two “People Patterns”: patterns for interacting with our customers and colleagues.

These skills are essential for success in your progrmming career - especially if you want to build valuable products, be appreciated, and have your point of view properly acknowledged. You don’t need to be a Rubyist to come along.

19:30 start at the FreeAgent offices, 40 Torphichen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8JB. Nibbles and drinks kindly supplied by FreeAgent.

For the November meetup we have Steven Baker will be joining us all the way from Canada.

###Bio: Steven Baker is the one of the key figures in the Ruby community. He is the creator of RSpec, the Behavior Driven Development framework for Ruby, and is often a featured speaker at many of the Ruby and Ruby on Rails conferences. Steven has seen over two dozen Rails applications to production development, utilizing his specific skills in scalability, security, and maintainability. Steven continues to collaborate with leaders of the Agile and Ruby communities and provides training and consulting for organizations to improve their knowledge, effectiveness, and manage growth.

More information on Steven, his writings, and his workshops can be found at http://stevenbaker.com

###Talk: Steven will be talking on the SOLID principles.

The meetup is being held at the usual venue SocietyM, 6:30pm for 7pm.

Thanks as always to New Context for sponsoring the venue. See you there.

This month is a Extreme Startup again. See below for the description from XP 2012.

Extreme Startup

In this hands-on workshop we aim to simulate product teams building software and delivering it into a market. Attendees form teams and compete to build the best product. Through the session you can continue to refine and upgrade your software, releasing new versions and testing their performance in the market. Once your software is live it will begin to accrue points, as simulated users use the software and score it against how well it fits their needs. The earlier you release your software, the sooner you will start accruing points, and the earlier you can learn something about the market, which should inform your next iteration. In the lean startup movement, this is know as the Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

Attendees of this session will need to build a very simple webapp, probably as part of a pair or a small team, so you will need at least one laptop per team.

So that we can get started quickly, it would be helpful if participants could do a little bit of preparatory work. Set up a minimal webapp running locally on your machine that handles a GET request, with a request param ‘q’, (e.g. http://localhost:4567/?q=Adam) and returns a plain text response. For example, using Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

configure do
  set :port, 4567
end

get '/' do
  q = params[:q]
  "Hello #{q}"
end

For the October meetup Iain Watt will be expanding on his Scot Ruby Conf lightening talk.

###Bio: Being brought up in the 70’s on a diet of Horizon & Tomorrows World I was always going to be interested in tech. I got my first proper hands-on exposure to tech with a BBC micro and haven’t looked back since. IBM and Compaq paid me to play with robotics, material handling systems, and manufacturing data collection & reporting systems - to build new stuff or to make things better. Fortunately I love to learn so that I can build new stuff or make things better but I hate it when something (particularly IT) doesn’t work the way I want it to.

###Talk: “The most important book you’ve never read, or possibly even heard of” I’ll introduce you to a handful of what Dr. John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist and affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, intriguingly terms “Brain Rules”. In the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, Medina explains, why we might want to re-evaluate our approach to our environments and to our practices in education, at work and at home to get the best from the most powerful tool we have at our disposal - our brain - and to harness the latest research findings to improve our learning capabilities. If you’re in any way interested in learning about learning and getting better at the things that interest you, come along to hear my talk. Hopefully I will convince you to go buy the book. Is it “The most important book you’ve never read, or possibly even heard of”? Probably.

The meetup is being held at the usual venue SocietyM, 6:30 for 7.

Thanks as always to New Context for sponsoring the venue. See you there.

Here’s the video of Ryan’s great September talk on PDFs:

Ryan Stenhouse’s PDFs are fun

Hi all

Unfortunately T.J. Sheehy has come down with something and is unable to speek at tomorrow nights Ruby Group.

But no worries, instead we will be doing a refactoring kata. So bring along your laptops and get some good practice in refactoring your code to be a happy developer.

As usual it will all take place at SocietyM starting at 7pm.

Thanks as always to New Context for sponsoring the venue.

Pat Allan: Cut and Polish A guide to Crafting Gems

Same Elliot: Erlang for Rubyists

For September, Ryan Stenhouse will regale us with marvellous tales of reading and writing PDFs in Ruby. There will be excitement. There will be laughter. There will be embedded fonts (I imagine).

September we have T.J. Sheehy bringing the wisdom of Charlie Chaplin to Glasgow ruby user group.

Chaplin’s Craft:

Charles Chaplin was intimately involved in crafting every part of his movies. His development techniques and approach to story design challenged the popular film making techniques of his day. What are the similarities and differences between Chaplin’s film making approach and how we create software? What insights can we gather from his work to help improve our own craft?

As usual it will all take place at SocietyM starting at 7pm.

Thanks as always to New Context for sponsoring the venue.

August is an exciting time to be in Edinburgh, not least because of our exciting Ruby Festival lineup of:-

• Pat Allan will be talking on building gems from scratch. Pat is well-known for Thinking Sphinx, travelling the world, and being an all-round top-bloke.
• Sam Elliot will be bending minds, relating Erlang to Ruby. Sam last entertained his with his Dusty Corners of Ruby talk in January.

The talks will take place at Fringe Venue #AF27, the FreeAgent offices (as usual) at 19:30.

Update: Changed the date to reflect reality. Update: Changed Sam’s talk.

This month’s Glasgow meetup will be a leisurely trip to the pub for some chat and beer.

We will meet at around 7pm at the Old Hairdressers on Renfield Lane.

On another note we have some great talks in the coming months for Glasgow so stay tuned for more soon.

June’s ScotRUG will be a a sneak-preview of a couple of Scottish Ruby Conference talks. Talks will be limited to 35 minutes; save your questions and feedback until afterwards.

Shadowboxing your way to a secure application, by Rory McCune

There are a number of potential approaches that developers and testers can take to reviewing the security of their applications and a growing number of tools to help the process along.

“Traditional” black box web application scanners and static analysis tools (aka white box tools) both have pros and cons in terms of things they will find and more importantly, things that they won’t.

This talk aims to review the ups and downs of both approaches and specific ruby based tools that can be used as part of the process. It will also highlight some areas where good old manual review is still key.

#How we learn a language by Ryan Stenhouse

We all use language in fun and interesting ways, even when we don’t think about it. Our industry brings us together with people from all over the world, even some of the folks attending this conference will speak English as a second or even third language.

In a past life I was a teacher of english as a foreign language, and these days I’ve kept that passion for languages alive by becoming multilingual myself.

I’ll speak about how we pick up a programming language in much the same way as we learn to speak a natural language and then integrate ourselves in the culture surrounding that programming language in much the same way.

I’m not going to talk at boring lengths about language theory, but instead evaluate how we learn a language as humans – regardless of its origin. I hope to make it clear that you can apply some of – if not all – the same skills you use to easily pick up a new programming language to give you a real leg-up in learning a foreign language.

You’ll never think about abstraction or obfuscation in exactly the same way again, and hopefully leave with a desire to test my assertion and learn another language, and that would be just great. 
Why would I want to do this? Well, I’m biased but I truly believe that the world would be a better place if people understood each other better – and that means more people becoming multilingual.

For June’s meeting in Glasgow we’re taking a small depature from Ruby land and taking a look at 2 different javascript frameworks,

• Dave Kennedy will be telling us about backbone.js
• Ijonas Kisselbach will be going over the ember.js framework

The meetup will be held as usual in SocietyM starting around 7pm.

As always thanks to Edgecase who kindly sponsor the venue for us.

For April’s meeting we have two fun talks:

• Ryan Stenhouse will be telling us about Rails’ i18n support and strategies
• Alan Gardner will be demonstrating the wonders of TMUX.

We haven’t done a coding session for a while, so March meeting we will tackle a coding problem, in pairs. Bring a laptop if you can and be prepared to test-drive some code.

Usual time (19:30) and the usual place (FreeAgent offices).

Already we have the videos from the February ScotRUG: Phil Roberts on Backbone.js.

Part 1

Part 2

Thanks to Marius for the videoing.

Here is the video from the January Meeting of Sam Elliott declaiming on the less well-known capabilities of core Ruby and the Standard Libraries.

Sam Elliot on the Dusty Corners of Ruby from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

Here is the video from the January Meeting of Ryan Stenhouse on The Culture of Internationalisation.

Ryan Stenhouse on The Culture of Internationalisation from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

Phil Roberts has just finished a large rewrite of Float to be a javascript-heavy front-end based application using Backbone.js. Phil will be telling us about the reason for the change, his experiences, and introducing us to Backbone.js.

Usual time (19:30) and the usual place (FreeAgent offices).

Thanks to strategic powercuts and other ridiculous problems, the December ScotRUG did not quite go to plan. But next week we will be back on form. We have 3 (3!!!) talks lined up, plus free (as in beer) beer from FreeAgent. Yay!

• Ryan Stenhouse will be talking about cultural differences when programming people-facing applications
• Sam Elliott will be taking us on a magical mystery tour of the more obscure (read exciting) corners of Ruby’s core classes and Standard Lib.
• Paul Wilson will be giving a quick demo of Mountable Apps in Rails 3.1.x.

You may also sign up on Lanyrd.

December ScotRUG is being held early and at a different location. It is at Cargo, at 129 Fountain Bridge, EH3 9QG; google map is here.

We will start at 18:00 for Ruby chats, which will include a Ruby Quiz with a special prize. At 19:00 those sufficiently ticketed will join the Edinburgh Startup Christmas party in the same venue. Tickets can be bought here, though at 11:00 on the 15th there was only one ticket remaining. Use the code ‘timewarp’ to get a bit of cash off, if you are fast enough.

Here is the video from the November meeting of Thomas Haggett talking about Puppet and MCollective.

Thomas Haggett on Puppet and MCollective from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

Brian’s code and presentation are here.

Here is the video from the November meeting of Brian Swan giving us take on faster Rails Tests, but without extracting your model methods into modules.

Brian Swan - Fast Rails Tests - ScotRUG November 2011 from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

Brian’s code and presentation are here.

November started on a Wednesday, so this month’s meeting comes earlier than expected. This month we have two talks

• Brian Swan will be giving us his take on Rails tests. Expect controversy and challenges to the new orthodoxies.
• Thomas Haggett will be talking about how he has successfully used Puppet and MCollective at FreeAgent, with patterns and suggestions to take away.

Don’t forget that the meetin is in our new venue, the wonderful FreeAgent offices. See the October post for detailed directions.

Updated 15 Nov 2011: added Thomas’ talk.

October’s meeeting is a mixed bag of short presentations:

• Mark Connell’s impressions from the 2011 RubyConf in New Orleans
• Paul Wilson’s further impressions from RubyConf and MagRails
• Matt Wynne on the training wheels coming off cucumber

Do not forget that we’ll be meeting at the brand new venue of FreeAgent’s new digs, 40 Torphichen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8JB, It is in the glass-fronted building on the right hand side of the road, just before the sharp bend if you are walking away from Haymarket. See the snapshot on Google Maps here. There is no FreeAgent signage, but there is a big 40 on the glass.

Those lovely people at FreeAgent have offered to host Edinburgh ScotRUG meetings at their fabulous new offices, near Haymarket station. They have even said that they may be able to provide us with a beer or two in their offices. The first meeting in this location will be on 20 October, 2011. (If their sofa reminds you of anything, best not to mention it though.)

The new venue is 40 Torphichen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8JB, or here on Google Maps.

_Update_: I’ve seen the sofa; it just looks like a sofa.

Suggested by Matt Wynne, September’s meetup is going to be all about making stuff. We will kick off the session with 5 minute presentations by people with project ideas, then we will break up into groups and start working on the project. We’ve already had a few ideas suggested on the mailing list.

• Matt Wynne wants to make a start on a test-based dynamic analysis tool for Ruby, DARTS.
• Sam Elliot wants some helping hands with Ruby Pair
• Drew Neil has an idea of applying Doctor JS, Mozilla’s Javascript Static Analysis tool to Coffeescript.

Come along, bring an idea and/or willingness to help and take part.

The cartoon below may be relevant:

We will be at the usual place, The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 15th September, starting at 19:30.

UPDATE: Sam Elliot won the contest by a long nose with the code here.

Another month, another exciting meeting. This month Robert Chatley and Matt Wynne will be running their Extreme Startup session, first shown at XP2011. Here’s the gen from Robert:

Extreme Startup

In this hands-on workshop we aim to simulate product teams building software and delivering it into a market. Attendees form teams and compete to build the best product. Through the session you can continue to refine and upgrade your software, releasing new versions and testing their performance in the market. Once your software is live it will begin to accrue points, as simulated users use the software and score it against how well it fits their needs. The earlier you release your software, the sooner you will start accruing points, and the earlier you can learn something about the market, which should inform your next iteration. In the lean startup movement, this is know as the Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

Attendees of this session will need to build a very simple webapp, probably as part of a pair or a small team, so you will need at least one laptop per team.

So that we can get started quickly, it would be helpful if participants could do a little bit of preparatory work. Set up a minimal webapp running locally on your machine that handles a GET request, with a request param ‘q’, (e.g. http://localhost:4567/?q=Adam) and returns a plain text response. For example, using Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

configure do
  set :port, 4567
end

get '/' do
  q = params[:q]
  "Hello #{q}"
end

We will be at the usual place, The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 18th August, starting at 19:30 sharp. Please try and be a little early.

July brings us more international speakers, in the shape of Joe O’Brien from the EdgeCase Columbus office. This time there is a mobile dimension: Joe will be talking about coding for Android in Ruby.

We will be at the usual place, The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 21st July.

UPDATE Here is the video from that meeting.

ScotRUG20110721JoeOBrien from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

Thanks to Martin for coming all the way from Berlin, as part of the new Ruby User Group Speaker Exchange Programme. You can find out more about the programme here. Also thanks to EdgeCase for covering the flights.

ScotRUG-2011-06-17-Martin-Rehfield from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

PS The song snippet at the beggining is from Jim Weirich’s _Why day song, Has Anybody Seen My Code?.

The June meeting is going to be a bit special - the first in a new European Speaker Exchange Programme masterminded by the Berlin Ruby User Group. Martin Rehfeld will be talking about the lessons learned developing his new service Assets.io featuring dynamic Javascript and CSS delivery through the Amazon Cloudfront CDN. Other parts include a custom backend using evented Ruby code (Thin/Async Rack/Eventmachine). It promises to be an exciting meeting, and in due course we’ll be catapulting one of our own speakers over the North Sea to Berlin. Martin will be in Edinburgh from June 14 to June 17, so let’s all make him welcome.

We will be at the usual place, The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 16 June.

The speaker exchange programme is looking for some sponsorship, particularly to cover Martin’s cost. If your company can help, get in touch via the Google Group or email paul [{at}] edgecase.com.

Ruby Golf is going the rounds of a few user groups. During the Edinburgh May meeting, we will jump on the band wagon for a 9-hole round. The aim will be to complete the 9 hole course, laid out in RSpec, in as few characters as possible.

If you can’t bring a laptop, don’t worry we’ll be working in teams.

We will be at the usual place, The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 19 May.

As promised, the March meeting will be another Ruby Koans session; this time we will be concentrating on blocks. Bring your laptops if you can, and it would be helpful to have downloaded the Koans and are ready to start. The Ruby Koans website is here

If you can’t bring a laptop, don’t worry we’ll be pairing.

We will be at the usual place, The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 17 March.

The February meeting will be a pub/social meeting at the Holyrood Tavern on Thursday 17 February from 19:30. The Ruby Koans session will be postponed until March.

Talking of March, the inaugural meeting of the Glasgow Ruby User Group is being held on March 5. You can find details here

The January meeting is an experiment to determine scientifically whether Mocks suck or do they rock. This will be done with live coding using a rigid methodolgy which we will make up on the spot. Bring a laptop if you have one. Also get the codes.

Matt Wynne’s Mock friendly code is here. Brian Swan’s Mock Hostile code is here

You can sign up on Bloop, here

Ho, ho, ho. As an early Christmas present here are two videos from the November session:-

ScotRUG Talks-Mark Connell on Websockets from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

ScotRUG Talks-Sam Elliott talks about Chrome Extensions from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

The January session will be on 20 January 2011, at the at the usual place: Edinburgh Training Centre, 16 St. Marys Street, EH1 1SU. We do not have an agenda yet, but more lightning talks are a possibility.

To cheer the dismal November days, come along to ScotRUG at 19:00 on Thursday November 18 to be heartened by cheery lightning talks at the at the usual place: Edinburgh Training Centre, 16 St. Marys Street, EH1 1SU.

We have:

• Mark Connell who will delight us with tales of websockets (with Ruby). You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll receive push notifications of events.
• Sam Elliot on Chrome Extensions
• Morgan Prior will be answering questions on The Ruby Mendicant University, a free online school open to anyone looking to improve their Ruby craftsmanship.

Who else would like to tell us something interesting? This month, talks can be up to 15 minutes long. Let us know on The Google Group.

[ Update: Talks added]

Thanks to Tanja Pislar for her new design of the ScotRUG site, with rounded CSScorners and everything. (Our previous design looked it was something knocked up by a programmer,without any particular design talent, in 20 minutes based on an old WordPress theme). Hope you enjoy it.

Two ScotRUG members have upcoming conference talks. Drew Neil is presenting at Arrrr Camp in Ghent on the 29th of October, and Paul Wilson at RubyConf in New Orleans on the 12th of November. At the October ScotRUG meeting they will both present slightly condensed versions of their talks.

• Drew’s talk is VIM - Walking Without Crutches
• Paul’s talk is Automated Acceptance Testing, The Vietnam of Test Driven Development

October’s meeting will start at 19:30 on Thursday the 21st of October, at the usual place: Edinburgh Training Centre, 16 St. Marys Street, EH1 1SU.

I’ve made a small step towards making the ScotRUG site more maintabable, and giving us a little bit of history. I have converted it to Jekyll. It is still not very pretty, but we can work on that. The source is on GitHub here. For now, if anyone wants to make it a bit nicer, please fork and send me a pull request.

By popular demand the next meeting will be an interactive session on Ruby Koans. Bring your laptops for some fun coding. Kickoff will be at 19:30 with a walkthrough. Then we will pair up and code through some more. We will have a debrief at the end followed (no doubt) by a visit to the Holyrood Tavern.

See you at The Edinburgh Training Centre on Thursday 16 September.

Videos of Matt Wynne’s and Brian Swan’s superb live(ish) TDD sessions are up on Vimeo, as our most of our last few sessions.

ScotRUG Talks Matt Wynne Outside-in TDD from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.

ScotRUG Talks - Brian Swan Inside Out TDD from Edge Case UK on Vimeo.