RUG is the London Ruby User Group; a community of ruby developers based in and around London. We meet up at least once a month; on the 2nd Monday of the month we have meetings with talks, demos and such-like and then we have pub-based meetups organised on an ad-hoc basis (roughly half-way between meetings).

Getting involved

The easiest way to get involved is just to turn up at our meetings and chat to people. If you want to get involved deeper we're also always looking for people to suggest things they'd like to hear about or talks they'd like to give at one of our meetings. We don't expect people to be experts, some of the best talks have been when people have shown off something they've just been playing with for a week or two. It doesn't even have to be a talk, we've run panel discussions, code-reviews, code-katas and even a pub quiz in the past, so we're not adverse to changing things around a little.

Getting free stuff!

As part of being a user group we've joined the user group programs of several publishers and occasionally we get free books in exchange for reviews. We've also managed to get our hands on discount codes to online stores, web-hosting and conferences in the past, so even if you can't make it to many of our meetings just lurking on our mailing has it's benefits.