For a while, i've been thinking of trying to kick off a more nebulous user group in Melbourne that has a much less specific technical focus - kind of like a monthly barcamp with lightning talks only (maximum 15 minutes). It seems inevitable that any programming language based user group will turn into something like a cutlery user group: there's a limit to the amount of momentum that can be maintained in discussions of how many tines a fork should optimally have or whether splayds should ever be taken seriously.
In addition to the sort of technical interests that directly relate to the work I do (ruby, java or .net mostly) i've also been getting into erlang, scala (and lift), f#, clojure (and compojure), haskell, functional programming generally and too many others to mention. Most conversations at the ruby group over pizza seem to revolve around these other more esoteric interests. It takes an enormous amount of time to research these things myself so i'd love to be able to attend regular (short, focused) presentations that save me some time. Also, the storm that immediately started brewing when Daniel mentioned his opinion on testing clearly indicated that we all have very different (and passionately held) beliefs on technical practices. Many people replied on this thread saying that they'd like to talk about how to do BDD. I was a little disappointed when the melbourne ruby user group morphed into rails oceania. Losing the parochialism was a great idea but mentioning rails in the group name seems a little overly specific for my liking (maybe only 50% of our presentations relate to rails). What does everyone think? Anyone else a dilettante like me? Mark. On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Dave Goddard <[email protected]>wrote: > > I would be very keen on a talk about testing > > On Jan 30, 2009, at 9:29 AM, Daniel N <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hey Guys, > > > > Thanx for letting me blah on a bit last night. It was good to get > > some of that info out there. > > > > Just a couple of things I wanted to follow up on. > > > > After talking to some folks after the presentation I realised I > > misrepresented myself a bit when talking about changing methods > > marked for private api use. When I say I change then it's not that > > I'm doing it maliciously to break ppls code. Rather that I just > > don't regard the private api. It's internal to the system that I'm > > making and if I need / want to change it for some reason then I > > will. If that's an restructure or just because I don't like the > > name, or if I want to change the behavior of that "private" method, > > then I will. I don't hold any regard and I expect that ppl will not > > use a method marked private. It's very liberating :) > > > > The other is specs. I made some very bold statements about specing > > without really justifying them. They're my opinion, and not mine > > alone. I realise that specing is somewhat of a religious topic > > though so I'd like to justify my stance a bit if ppl are up for it. > > I'd like to do a talk next month and focus on BDD. Anyone up for > > that? > > > > Thanx for a good night. > > > > Cheers > > Daniel > > > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
