London (UK) Ruby meeting, February 28

[David A. Black]

Hi --

For people in or near London who are not on the London Ruby mailing
list:

There's going to be a Ruby users meeting in London next Monday,
February 28, 7:00 PM, in the pub (Callaghans) at the Holiday Inn
Bloomsbury (near Russell Square tube; see map at
http://www.london-bloomsbury.holiday-inn.com/lonbl/location.html).

See you there!


David

 

[James G. Britt]

Hi --

For people in or near London who are not on the London Ruby mailing
list:

There's going to be a Ruby users meeting in London next Monday,
February 28, 7:00 PM, in the pub (Callaghans) at the Holiday Inn
Bloomsbury (near Russell Square tube; see map at
http://www.london-bloomsbury.holiday-inn.com/lonbl/location.html).

See you there!

David

Racking up those frequent-flier miles, aren't we?

James

 

[Robert McGovern]

Racking up those frequent-flier miles, aren't we?

Mmm, one wonders where he is going to end up next. I wonder has David
taken on the role of Ruby's Good Will ambassador

 

[Matt Mower]

Mmm, one wonders where he is going to end up next. I wonder has David
taken on the role of Ruby's Good Will ambassador

We'll let you know that when we see how quickly he gets his round in

M

 

[Robert McGovern]

We'll let you know that when we see how quickly he gets his round in

Heh, wife permitting I'm going to be there myself to find out

I'm down near Brighton so its not really much of a trek.

Rob

 

[Robert McGovern]

Hi --

For people in or near London who are not on the London Ruby mailing
list:

See you there!

and David did indeed see us there, 11 of us in fact which apparently
is something of a miracle

A good night was had by all, though most of it was spent introducing
ourselves to each other in the pub, then around 10 it was off to get
food at an Indian restraunt down the road. A proper report is on the
way later I believe (there was someone there keeping minutes).

 

[Rob .]

Here are some brief notes from the Feb 2005 London Ruby Group meeting.
We had 11 people in attendance, including four Robert's, which was a
little confusing. We did a round table each speaking about our Ruby
connections, interspersed and followed by general discussion and quite
a few pints. All agreed to get onto the ruby-talk IRC channel if they
weren't already. If you want to find out about plans for the next
London meeting subscribe to the Ruby London list:
http://browser.org/mailman/listinfo/rubylondon

Below is a summary of some points of interest from the meeting, please
add or correct if necessary. The lists are probably quite incomplete.


Ruby is being used in:
- UK Parliament House of Commons - for publishing
- Communications agency in the advertising market
- New startup in stealth-mode
- Various opensource/academic projects

Some topics talked about (very incomplete list):
- Ruby being used in commercial projects
- scalability of Rails/Active Record
- test-first programming - requires discipline but worth it!
- speed of performance vs. speed of development and maintenance (will
yarv be there to improve the former?)
- telecommuting being socially depressing
- sometimes easier to write solution in Ruby than download Ruby tool
- Ruby community is helpful to all - term "egoless programmers" was mentioned

Some things being written in Ruby:
- PhD research work (GIS)
- Miscellaneous scripting
- News aggregator
- Topic map serialization api
- World data visualization service
- HTTP cache gem

Things being done for Ruby:
- Providing jobs for Ruby prog'rs (thanks Sean and Ben!)
- Ruby London mailing list server
- Ruby plugin for jEdit

Ruby frameworks/tools in use:
- Rails/Active Record
- Needle
- Instiki

Languages used in day job:
- Ruby
- Perl
- Java
- .Net/C#

Ruby editor survey approx. results (some people listed more than once):
vi/vim - 4
textmate - 2
textedit/textpad - 2
scite - 1
emacs - 1
jedit - 1 (Rob McKinnon is working on Ruby plugin)
eclipse/rdt - 1 (Rob McGovern co-authored "Eclipse in Action" book)
freeride - 1
arachno - 1
whatever's there - 1

Thanks to all who were there. A good night, hopefully followed by many
more in the coming months.

 

[Robert McGovern]

Ruby editor survey approx. results (some people listed more than once):

scite - 1

That was me ....

eclipse/rdt - 1 (Rob McGovern co-authored "Eclipse in Action" book)

Heh, that was Matt ... I was saying I use Scite despite being the
co-author of EiA.

Rob