Follow us on Twitter

Scottish Ruby User Group

About

The Scottish Ruby User Group is a collection of people who are linked with Scotland and have an interest in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

We meet every month online and in person in Edinburgh for presentations from members and guests, and a chat about Ruby and related subjects.

All are welcome, and there are no subscriptions or costs involved.

Meetings are announced in advance on the mailing list, Meetup, and Google Group and follow our code of conduct.

You can also find us on:

Meeting up

We currently meet online on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00. Currently we’re experimenting with the most appropriate video conferencing solution. Links will be posted the day before if you’re signed up on Meetup.

Mailing List

You can browse and subscribe to the list using the ScotRUG Google Group information page. The list is for announcements of activities and general Ruby support and discussion; feel free to post any questions you may have.

IRC

We have a Freenode channel #scotrug, though it’s quite quiet. There’s also the Gitter channel around the ScotRUG github repository. It is also quiet.

Code of Conduct

To ensure we provide a welcoming and friendly environment for all, attendees, speakers, organisers, and volunteers at any ScotRUG meetup are required to conform to our code of conduct.

Organizers will enforce this code throughout the meetup and meetup-related social events.

Videos

Videos of previous presentations have been provided courtesy of Cultivate.

Building an LLM in Ruby

posted 16 Sep 2025

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.

Our code of conduct

All posts