Surrey Rubyists is rebooting!

After a break, we are rebooting Surrey Rubyists! We have a new venue and I’ve got some help which will make all the difference!

The Details

The next meet will be on: Tuesday 24th January 2012

Starts: 7:00pm

The new venue is: The Keep, 29 Castle St, Guildford, Surrey, GU1 3UW (map: http://g.co/maps/sja8n, site: http://www.thekeepguildford.co.uk)

What’s happening on the night?

This time round we have 4 x 30 minute talks:

1. My first Ad Network - Neil Middleton

Since August Kyan have been developing an advertising network for a client. This presentation will be a 100mph overview of how we decided to structure the project, some of the key decisions we made along the way, and how we are managing the system. We'll be looking at the technologies used, plus having a dive into some of the ancillary support tools that we use day to day.

There will be no code in this presentation.

I am one of the lead developers on the project at Kyan, the best Ruby agency in Guildford at the top of the High Street.  I've been developing on the web for bloomin' ages, and am a big time Heroku advocate. I don't like marmite.

2. Background processing with Redis and Resque - Gavin Heavyside

Resque is a Redis-backed library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later. Whether you want to keep your web app responsive to users by doing the heavy lifting asynchronously, or you want to build an event-driven processing pipeline, Resque can give you a distributed queue-driven, persistent, asynchronous platform. Resque is powered by Redis, a fast, persistent data structures server. I'll introduce and demo the features of Redis, and show how you can do background processing or build a message queue driven architecture using Resque.

I am Director of Engineering at MyDrive Solutions, a Guildford-based company that specialises in analysis of vehicle telematics data for the insurance industry. We use Redis for several tasks, and Resque powers our queue-driven scalable distributed data processing pipeline.

3. Game Development in Ruby - Peter Cooper

Lots of demos and weird stuff, just to keep it fun. I'm interested in ways to use games and graphics to cover non-gaming topics as well.

Peter does a million and one things but you probably know him from one of the following:

• Ruby Inside
• Ruby Weekly
• JavaScript Weekly
• HTML5 Weekly
• Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough
• Author of Beginning Ruby

4. Your Tests Are Lying To You - Chris Parsons

Mocks have an a bad rap lately. We've all seen brittle and unreadable test code riddled with 'shouldreceive' and 'mockmodel', leading to classes people don't dare to touch. RSpec has now taken "mock_model" out of their default scaffolding for Rails controllers, and is preferring real objects. Does this mean that the concept of interaction testing is flawed? Well designed code is easy to test, and mocks enhance your sense of smell. State-based testing will lie to you and hide your bad code for longer, but your interaction tests explode if you don't keep your code clean and your object collaborators few. That's as it should be. Come to this talk if you want to hear a robust defence of mocks as a testing tool, see some examples of ruby code exhibiting the dangers of a reliance on state-based testing, and hear how you can use mocks to heighten your sense of smell, decrease coupling and increase cohesion.

Chris Parsons is a freelance thinker, agilist, coder, trainer, technologist and testing addict. He has been crafting software professionally for 13 years, with the last 6 years spent mostly working with Ruby.

Big Thanks

Thanks to two awesome companies: 1minus1 and Kyan. We are combining our skills to organise Surrey Rubyists, help spread the word and try out some interesting new ideas. Thanks guys <3 <3 <3 <3