Sean began this month’s meeting by announcing that the Zeal Team had traveled to Los Angeles to attend the recent Software Craftsmanship Conference, and that the talks will be available online. Conference talks included presentations on writing great code, working with teams, and education.
He then said that he would like to do a Code Retreat, within the group, at a future meeting. He explained that a Code Retreat is where you form two-person teams to work on a problem for about 45 minutes, and then add a constraint and work on the problem for another 45 minutes. For example, one constraint might be that you can’t use any primitives; another constraint might be that you can’t talk to your partner but you can only communicate via the tests that you arrange, letting the test results express your feedback.
Several people had signed up to give five-minute presentations on various topics tonight:
- Elixir / Game Development
- NodeJS
- Cryptography
- JS Frameworks
- Web Security
- Algorithms
- Mobile Web Technologies
- Design Patterns
Sean launched the presentations by introducing Elixir, a fairly new programming language, based on a vintage programming language called Erlang, with syntax similar to Ruby. The accompanying runtime package, Phoenix, is very similar to Rails.
Michelle talked about Node.js, a runtime built upon Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, that “uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.”
Daniel launched a discussion of Cryptography which encouraged audience participation.
Jesse’s presentation was about Web Security, and he had to deal with service interruptions at the beginning of his talk. Things were settling down right about the time that I had to leave the event for another appointment; sorry I missed the ending.
Even though I was unable to stay for the remainder of Jesse’s and other presentations, I feel confident that all of the presentations were well-received. And, beyond the warm reception, there was a camaraderie that developed, forgiving any glitches that may have happened or knowledge that went undelivered; instead focusing on encouraging the presenters. In all cases, further information is available at various websites. Beyond that, experimenting with the ideas and products presented at this workshop are left as an exercise for the user.
The spirit of the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto guided all who were present: productive partnerships forming a community of professionals who steadily add value and produce well-crafted software. This sends a message to all individuals who labor away in their isolated individual workspaces: Join Us!
The next meeting of Software Craftsmanship at Zeal is scheduled for the last Tuesday in November: 11/29/16, starting at 6:00 p.m.
Author: Karen
Written: 10/28/16
Published: 10/30/16
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