The weather seems to have taken a turn for the worse, so why not join us on Monday 18th August, back in our home venue of the Adelphi (now with a fresh lick of paint!) for an evening of beer, chat and two awesome talks!

First up, we have Michael Heap of DataSift who will be talking about Vagrant and Ansible:

Vagrant is a tool for automating the creation of virtual machines using either Virtualbox or VMware. Of course, automating the creation of a VM is only half of the battle – once you have one you need to configure it. That’s where Ansible comes in.

Ansible is a third generation configuration tool (think Puppet or Chef, but easier), allowing you to install software and configure things as you need in an automated manor. Once we can spin up VM’s and provision them with software automatically, we add some form of predictability to our environments.

This talk introduces everyone to Vagrant and Ansible, and walks through creating an initial VM that installs PHP, Apache2 and configures an example website with a custom VirtualHost.

Next up will be Richard McIntyre with “Should it?”: A new approach to BDD - pain not included.

At a major broadcaster where I have been working we have invested heavily in to the BDD process. Devs are trained in it, the business promotes it, time is given to us to be able to focus on it. Even so, we have made many mistakes. Our Cucumber builds can take hours, tests get forgotten, are hard to maintain and break often.

Well documented feature files and visibility of implementation along with test coverage is still essential in the agile process. We solved this by creating our own BDD tool and framework called “Should It?”.

This completely new approach is not bound by any particular technology or programming language - you can choose what language you write your tests in.

We’ve set up an Eventbrite page this month, in an attempt to help reach out to people who don’t ordinarily attend. We’d like to stress that registering for a ticket on Eventbrite is not required, but please do register if you can, to help us better gauge interest. Cheers!

http://leeds-php.eventbrite.co.uk

Michael Heap

Michael’s a fixer at @DataSift. He works with various high volume data sources (including the Twitter firehose) in real time. Day to day, you can usually find him working with PHP or Go, with a bit of NodeJS or Python thrown in to keep things interesting.

Richard McIntyre

Richard McIntyre is a Japanese speaking web developer living in Leeds, UK. He has experience in creating interactive websites and multilingual applications in English, Japanese and others for over 10 years. He’s also well versed in a number of programming languages including PHP, Ruby and Python.