Last night we had excellent turn-out at the Northern VA Ruby Users Group. Rich Kilmer gave an enlightening talk on Domain Specific Languages and Devin Mullins delivered an interesting performance piece on Rails plugins where he wrote code while singing about it (ensuring that the code matched his meter and rhyme).
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Last night I participated in a “code fest” sponsored by my employer. It was great fun and the code fest was powered by TopCoder. This was my first time participating in any sort of coding competition and while I didn’t make the top three, I did place in the top ten. I’m definitely looking forward to the next company sponsored event in February.
For those of you not familiar with TopCoder, they basically provide a Java application/applet called the Competition Arena. Once you login to the arena, you can then register for a Single Round Match (SRM, in TopCoder parlance), but only during the registration window (which appears to be two hours prior to the event). Once the event begins you have 75 minutes to solve problems of increasing difficulty. Each problem set is assigned a certain number of points (usually 250, 500 and 1000). You are judged both on the correctness of your program as well as the time it took you to develop and test it.
Below are my notes from the second day of sessions here at OSCON. The talks I attended were:
Below are my notes from the first day of sessions here at OSCON. The talks I attended were:
Tonight I was able to attend FOSCON II at FreeGeek (I wish they’d hold FOSCON at the OCC so it wasn’t such a hassle to get there and back – but I will say the volunteers who walked us down there and then drove us back did make it easier). Follow the link below for brief summaries of the presentations and links to them.
This morning I attended Stuart Halloway’s Ajax on Rails tutorial. The slides from his presentation are available here, here and here. This was the first time I’d attended one of Stuart’s presentations and I was impressed by his relaxed presentation style. He also seems to be a genuinely nice fellow – during the break, I spoke briefly with him to see if he would be interested in speaking about Streamlined to the NoVA RUG.
