Definitely agree - especially for those of us who only get to intermittently use ruby at work, a lot of the practical "this plugin is fabulous" talks, while interesting, are less interesting (to me) than meta-talks around new ways to do things in general, like BDD and storyrunner/cucumber style things, for example. If I actually had to solve day-to-day ruby/rails problems, I'm sure I'd have a different focus!
Also, the general subject of multi-language development interests me - where is it appropriate say to use jRuby for your application, with bits of clojure for some multi-threaded goodies? Very few of us use only one language any more - especially if you count javascript, and DSLs... But I'd still like to have the ruby group as well - ruby is still my first love, when it comes to 'new' languages :) Haven't found anything with the simplicity and clarity, not to mention the wonderful community, that is found in ruby. - Korny On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Mark Ryall <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >> > >> > > >> >> > > > > > -- Kornelis Sietsma korny at my surname dot com kornys on gmail, twitter, facebook, etc. "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
