July 2012 Meetup Roundup

Wow, what. a. night! I was totally blown away by the turnout last night, the final head count was 24! Definitely a record breaker and I couldn't be happier, it was great to see so faces new and old! So welcome to everyone that came along for the first time and thanks for coming back those that have been before! I really hope we can keep the numbers this high. It made for a really good post talk session and I hope you all got to meet each other and find out the latest and greatest in the world of development Ruby or not. 

The talks were both excellent too and I learnt a lot from both of them. Matthew (@undecisive) gave a talk on the Wrong gem which looks like a really useful tool for giving more detailed information in your tests when they fail (which is precisely when you want the most information) so I will definitely be giving this a go in my next Ruby project. Check it out here: https://github.com/sconover/wrong

Chris (@chrissinjo) gave a controversial ("Java is great"??) ;) but excellent talk on mutation testing and had converted it from the Java version he previously gave to use Ruby examples and Ruby tools, so thank you very much for that. What I found fascinating in this talk was how much time and effort has to go into mutation testing to get the most benefit out of it. Definitely a useful technique, alas hindered by immature tools in Ruby, but I really like the idea of a gem randomly changing your code to see if your tests will catch the errors. 

This will be a little different, and will be on the *second* Tuesday of August, the 14th. It will be IPRUG's second birthday and I'd like to celebrate, so we'll get some cake and pizza in and see if we can't get a bar tab as well. So if you'd like to give a talk please let me know, I think this will be a fun session so the topic needn't be too complex or heavy! 

See you next month!

Tom