Surrey Rubyists is rebooting!

[andypike]

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 next meet will be on: Tuesday 24th January 2012 starting at:
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)

This time round we are looking for 4 speakers to do a 30 minute slot
each. So if you fancy putting your name down please let me know via
the discussion group (http://groups.google.com/group/surrey-rubyists).
Topics can be anything Ruby related. If you would like to speak but
need some inspiration for a topic we have some suggestions here:
http://surreyrubyists.uservoice.com

Once I have confirmation of speakers and their topics I’ll add them
here and let you all know.

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

[andypike]

To the speakers, I need the following items from you so I can announce
your talks and get everyone excited:

1. Title of talk
2. Brief description of talk
3. Short speaker bio

So far these are the confirm speakers in no particular order (one more
needed):

* Gavin Heavyside
* Neil Middleton
* Peter Cooper
* ?

If you know of anyone who would like to take the final 30 min slot,
then please let me know.

Cheers

Andy

[Gavin Heavyside]

Background processing with Redis and Resque - Gavin Heavyside

Resque (https://github.com/defunkt/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 (http://redis.io), 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.

[Neil Middleton]

I'll be doing this:

'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.

Neil