Thanks to everyone for coming last night, we seem to be getting an excellent sized crowd in quite regularly now,we had 12 of us there last night! This is really really cool, I hope we can keep expanding and keep up the fantastic quality of talks. Speaking of which, a huge thanks to both Kerry Buckley and Pixelh8 for speaking last night, both were excellent talks and I learnt loads! Not least that I really need to take another look at IO and Clojure but that I really really want to find some old computer/toys and try some circuit bending. I might need a fire extinguisher on stand by though.

Hi Guys, 

Update update!:

Bit of a change to the schedule as I haven't had time to finish the code for my talk on Neo4J and so Matthew Applegate (@pixelh8) is kindly stepping in to give a talk on all manner of exciting music based hacking!

Update:

Thanks to everybody who came along to April's meetup, I hope everybody had a good time and learnt something about Algorithm Design and Factory girl.

In case you missed it; here are the slides!

See you next month!

Tom

Click here to download:

factory_girl.ppt (1.32 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

factory_girl.ppt (1.32 MB)

Click here to download:

Overview of Algorithms & the minimum cut.ppt (84 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Overview of Algorithms & the minimum cut.ppt (84 KB)

Hi Everyone, 

We've had quite a few presentation meetups lately, and an excellent lightning talk session too, so by my reckoning it's about time for a coding challenge!

I've been having a bit of a think about this, and looked through some of the Ruby Quizzes, and this one looks like a lot of fun. We're going to implement... A Rogue[1] Walker!

The aim of this will be to explore the dungeons (supplied on the night) and escape in the fastest time possible. You will need to implement a class which displays the dungeon & player on each step, and knows how to cope with the following elements:

+ = door ( the stairs may be behind a door)
~ = liquid (water => blue, lava => red, acid => green)
# = wall
< = up stairs (back to the town)
> = down stairs (deeper into the dungeon toward the exit)
^ = trap
* = gold (found in walls, ie ##*##)
X = Finish

Bonus points will be awarded for finding gold along the way, in the form of time deductions.

See you at the next meetup!

Tom

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_%28video_game%29

Implementation Details:

1) You will be given a set of text files which will contain the dungeon layouts. So your walker will need to read these
2) You will need to explore each dungeon until you find the down stairs, you can only see where you have been and the squares immediately surrounding your walker.
3) Your time will finish once you have stepped onto the X square.

Hey Guys,

The schedule for Tuesday's meetup (the 7th) is as follows:

Matthew Robinson: "A short history of programming languages"
Kerry Buckley: "A-Z of Ruby"
Matthew Bennett: "Emacs: Vim, improved"
Matthew Robinson: "Things I learnt from SICP"
Rupert: An introduction to Jasmine
Steve Butterworth: "HAML Sucks"

If anyone else has any last minute talks they'd like to give, please let me know!

So as usual, meet @ The Brewery Tap pub, Ipswich anytime from 7pm and the talks will start at 7:30pm.

See you there!

Thanks everyone for another great meetup last night! 14 people! I hope we can keep the numbers this high for the rest of the year!

Thanks go to @Alkesh for his mind bending talk on VIm. If you hadn't tried VIm before I'm sure you want to now!

Vim slides are here:

The slides from my talk on Ruby and Rails Antipatterns are below, hopefully you all found it useful!

Click here to download:

RubyAntipatterns.pdf (4.58 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

RubyAntipatterns.pdf (4.58 MB)

Entries on a Christmas card please! (Or a suitably festive email).

Please note that we are on the SECOND Tuesday of the month for this month only. So update your filofaxes to January 10th 2012: 7:30  at the brewery tap.

Ideas:
1) The Ruby Rogues did a show on Ruby Antipatterns.. that might be quite an interesting topic?

Cheers

Tom