October Meetup

Wow, what a meetup this month was, not only did we have a huge turnout, we also had two really brilliant talks. A massive thanks to both Kerry Buckley and Henry Garner (and all his gear!) for coming along and presenting!

Kerry gave a fascinating presentation on how to get your tests to run faster. The gist of which was to remove Rails and it's class loading as much as possible. As a by product it also introduced some concepts that sounded very familiar to the Data Context Interaction paradigm: http://andrzejonsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/02/dci-and-rails.html

Kerry's code can be found here;
https://github.com/kerryb/iprug-fast-rails-tests

Henry's talk was entitled "Ruby in the Real World" and was about some hardware hacking he had been doing recently, with his Arduino (using it to fry gherkins) and his 3D printer, which he has built the Cupcake gem for (http://rubygems.org/gems/cupcake). It was great to see both in action and very entertaining! It was also really interesting seeing Ruby doing something other than webapps. I think it certainly inspired a lot of us to look at doing some Arduino stuff.

Pictures and videos!

Hope to see you all again next month!

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