Hope everyone is having a good new year so far. I wanted to update everyone on the meeting location. You might remember in our last meeting we left things kind of up in the air on where we’d be meeting next and when. And while we’re still working out all the details, I do have some good news.
I just got off a user group leadership call, and it looks like we’ll be able to stay at the Microsoft office indefinitely. Though it does look like as a result we might have to move our the day of the month that we meet.
I am currently working with other user group leaders about possibly sharing a night. Please continue to watch this space for more updates, as once we have all the kinks ironed out, we’ll be looking at getting the ball rolling for the new year.
Please note that the next meeting for Houston Open Developer User Group has been canceled. There are a few reasons for this and they are as follows:
We currently do not have a place to meet. This is something that I will look into after I return from Nebraska
Secondly, Josh and I are BOTH dealing with family related medical issues (mine currently have me in Nebraska for my son’s issues), and these take priority.
I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, and please keep an eye out here for future updates. Once I return home from Nebraska, I will put a large effort into finding us a regular meeting place and get the meetings back on track.
Join us for our next Houston Open Development User Group meeting, a group for discussing all things development. On Decemver 1, 2011 where Michael Koby will be giving everyone an introduction to iPhone development with MonoTouch. The meeting will be held at 6:30pm at the Microsoft office in Houston, TX: 2000 W Sam Houston Pkwy S Ste 350, Houston, TX 77042. As usual, pizza and drinks will be provided.
With MonoTouch, you can leverage your existing .NET C# skill set to create functional iPhone applications that you can also sell in the iPhone App Store. During this presentation, Michael will be giving an overview of MonoTouch, a brief introduction to Mono, the framework that MonoTouch is built on, and will even rebuild the Twitter search application that be built last month using C# and MonoTouch.
Join us for our next Houston Open Development User Group meeting, a group for discussing all things development. On November 1, 2011 where Michael Koby will be giving everyone an introduction to iPhone development. The meeting will be held at 6:30pm at the Microsoft office in Houston, TX: 2000 W Sam Houston Pkwy S Ste 350, Houston, TX 77042. As usual, pizza and drinks will be provided.
Creating mobile apps is the hottest new “get rich quick” route for developers (which is to say many people try, few actually “get rich”), and the iPhone started it all. During this meeting, Michael Koby will give us a brief overview of developing for the iPhone, and will even build a small application to give you an idea of what is involved in creating applications for the iPhone. If you have an Mac laptop, feel free to bring it along and make sure you have XCode and the latest iPhone SDK installed if you plan to follow along.
Wikipedia says that “Clojure is a recent dialect of the Lisp programming language created by Rich Hickey. It is a general-purpose language supporting interactive development that encourages a functional programming style, and simplifies multithreaded programming.Clojure runs on the Java Virtual Machine and the Common Language Runtime. Like other Lisps, Clojure treats code as data and has a sophisticated macro system.”
The idea behind the Koans is that you can learn a language by working through a set of unit tests designed to teach you various aspects of the language being taught.
I hope we’ll see you there. And again, be sure to set up your computer prior to coming, USB sticks will be provided with a copy of the repository for those that forget.
Join us for our next Houston Open Development User Group meeting, a group for discussing all things development. On September 6, 2011 where Jared will be continuing Peter’s talk from last month on Powershell. The meeting will be held at 6:30pm at the Microsoft office in Houston, TX: 2000 W Sam Houston Pkwy S Ste 350, Houston, TX 77042. As usual, pizza and drinks will be provided.
Jared will be continuing Peter’s talk from last month, and will focus on some of the build and deployment pieces that Peter did not have time to get to. If you want to learn some more Powershell, be sure to join us.
Join us for our next Houston Open Development User Group meeting, a group for discussing all things development. On August 2, 2011 where Peter Seale will be telling us all about the Powershell with a presentation entitled “Script Like A Neckbeard With WIndows PowerShell. (Or, You’re Doing Your Build & Deployment Wrong)”. The meeting will be held at 6:30pm at the Microsoft office in Houston, TX: 2000 W Sam Houston Pkwy S Ste 350, Houston, TX 77042. As usual, pizza and drinks will be provided.
Peter will be showing us how to use Powershell to automate project deployment as well as other various tasks one might need when working in a Windows environment. If you attended July’s session on Bash (video here), this would be the Windows world’s equivalent. So come learn how to use Powershell with us.
Join us for our next Houston Open Development User Group meeting, a group for discussing all things development. On July 5, 2011 where Josh Kessler will be telling us all about the Bash Shell. The meeting will be held at 6:30pm at the Microsoft office in Houston, TX: 2000 W Sam Houston Pkwy S Ste 350, Houston, TX 77042. As usual, pizza and drinks will be provided.
Josh will be showing us how he uses Bash on daily basis to help him automate tasks and get stuff done. He’ll also answer questions about using Bash that anyone might have. So if you have questions on how to do something in Bash, bring them to the meeting.
Joshua Kessler is an IT Manager who has worked as a professional software developer with over a decade of experience. I’ve been using Linux and other un*x like operating systems as my primary OS from as far back as 1993. He is also the vice president of the Houston Open Development User Group.
Join us for our next Houston Open Development User Group meeting, a group for discussing all things development. On June 7, 2011 we’ll be continuing the Ruby based Test Driven Development Dojo using RSpec. The meeting will be held at 6:30pm at the Microsoft office in Houston, TX: 2000 W Sam Houston Pkwy S Ste 350, Houston, TX 77042.
As mentioned above we’ll be continuing our Poker Hands dojo, but we’ll be changing the testing framework to RSpec (at the request of several attendees of the last meeting). If you’re not familiar with RSpec, be sure to checkout the web site for RSpec 2.
If you’d like to see how far we got on the previous dojo, please checkout the code on the Github repository.
If you have never attended a coding dojo before, here’s how we generally do it:
Single computer connected to the projector, a pair of programmers start the dojo
First programmer writes a test and gets the test to pass, and sits back down
New person comes up to replace first programmer
Second programmer (second half of the initial pairing) refactors previous programmers code and then writes a new test and writes the code to make that test pass, then sits down
This process repeats itself until the dojo is done or time is up
We also follow the following rules:
Take baby steps, write just enough code for the test you wrote to pass, no more
When you’re writing the code you’re safe, we’re here to learn not heckle the coders. Help, don’t heckle
Everyone is part of at least 1 pairing. Since it’s safe you don’t have to worry about making a mistake.
Take baby steps (this is important because everyone forgets it quickly)
So please come join us as we work together to solve a problem using Ruby and Test Driven Development.
