Last night I attended the October meetup of the London Ruby User Group. I’m glad to see that it is an active community in London and last night apparently held the biggest turnout with about 40 (ish) people turning up. The meetup hosted two guest speakers who both spoke about DSLs (a popular topic that apparently came up in August as well). The first speaker, Robert Brooks took an admittedly less technical approach and spoke of the impact that they had at his work for some new shared department between the House of Commons and House of Lords, where he is using both Ruby on Rails and Ruby in several ways. The second speaker, Damien Turner gave a little bit more of a hands on approach to DSLs as inspired by a number of blog entries by Jay Fields.

Like most English meetups, eventually the night turned to the pub where you got to chat and meet the rest of the attendees. Interestingly a lot of them were java programmers who either wanted to use ruby, or are using ruby in some support form, but a few are doing ruby or Ruby on Rails as part of their day job. I thought the community was great, and I’ll definitely be trying to make it along next month. If you want to come along, check out the LRUG website or check out the next event on the London upcoming site.