GeekNight 12/15/2010

Richard Jensen installed IntelliJ 10 Community Edition and puttered around a bit.
Paul Hammant gave a brief look at his stack trace reducer idea.
Paul Holser was working on his JUnit 'quick check' project.
Greg Heartsfield continued work on his 52-in-52 project--inducting newcomer Dhawal Shah.
Yujun Liang was present but left before disclosing his activities.
Cosmin Stejerean and Eric Smalling continued work on the Hudson build radiator.


This is our last Geek Night in Dallas for 2010. Happy Holidays everyone and a prosperous 2011!

Geek Night 12/08/2010

Our small band of intrepid open-sourcers met for another session.

• Bill Schofield was present for a short time but had to leave early.
• Greg Heartsfield spent most of the evening educating Richard Jensen on node.js and his book a week tracker (52-in-52).
• Eric Smalling and Cosmin Stejerean worked on a Hudson build monitor.
• Paul Hammant worked on an example of JBehave driving interaction with a website.

Are you in the north Texas area? We meet every Wednesday night at the ThoughtWorks office in Addison, TX.

Geek Night 12/01/2010

ThoughtWorkers barely outnumbered guests (5-4) due to a southern contingent arriving.

Bill Schofield and Eric Smalling worked in Objective-C (OpenGL) on shape drawing--think asteroids triangle.
Rodrigo Wolschick and Duda Dornelles (from TW Brazil) did some work in Groovy on groobe.
Richard Jensen shaved yaks. (Trying to figure out how to get a project perspective in eclipse for creating Firefox plugins).
Greg Heartsfield and Sebastien Blanc node.js application for book reading lists.
Paul Hammant and Chris Petersen were doing frequent git pulls from Greg's project--forcing him to make his project more accessible to newcomers.

Geek Night 11/17/2010

Another small group tonight but we had some added excitement!
The building (and some of surrounding Addison) lost power about an hour into our Geek Night activities.

Prior to the disruption:

• Paul Hammant and Cosmin Stejerean worked on some XStream issues--and were able to create a patch before we lost power.
• Greg Heartsfield was showing Sebastien Blanc his Fermata project. During the blackout Greg gave an impromptu lightning talk on the project to the group.
• First time attendee Christina Zhong basically arrived just in time to be caught by the power outage.
• Addison Lee actually arrived after the outage occurred.
• Jim from Midnight Coders dropped by for a bit while we were in the dark.

 After a suitable waiting period we retired to a nearby restaurant and had a lively discussion.

There will not be a Geek Night in Dallas next Wednesday.

Do You Gosu?

Early days yet but it looks interesting. It reminds me somewhat of C# circa .NET 3.5

• var
• closures (blocks, lambdas)
• enhancements (I think this is like extension methods)
• object initializers

Geek Night 11/10/2010

A smaller group tonight.

• Greg Heartsfield was working on some S3 versioning code.
• Paul Hammant and Richard Jensen were looking at Gosu.
• Yujun Liang was present for a short while.
• Bill Schofield paired with Eric Jansen on his particle app before having to leave early.
• We had another ThoughtWorker observer who paid for the pizza. (Thanks, Bruce!)

Geek Night 10/27/2010

The TV at the ThoughtWorks Dallas office couldn't get the Rangers game--but we held Geek Night anyway.

• Greg Heartsfield and Jennifer Weingarten -- Demonstration Android App with documentation/unit tests that accesses the buzz capability of the phone.
• Lejo and Michael Perry -- Porting Correspondence to Windows Phone 7.
• Paul Hammant and Richard Jensen-- Fixed a problem in JBehave with large numerical values (conversion to BigDecimal) accounting for different locales (thousands separator, radix point).
• Srini Raguraman and Jason Johnson -- Worked on an RSS feed reader for tracking github commits.
• Yujun Liang was present for a short while and described a problem--but no one picked it up when he left.
• Bill Schofield was also present for a short while discussing programming/software practices with Jim Plamondon.

Geek Night 10/20/2010

We had twelve hardy open-sourcers this evening.
If you've seen any of my previous session reports a lot will look familiar.

Android support in IntelliJ CE

I haven't done any iPhone or Android development.

I have downloaded XCode, but since I'm becoming partial to IntelliJ, I'm interested in this announcement. I still don't have a smart phone. Is a droid possibly in my future?

IntelliJ shortcut wallpaper

Available here in 1680x1050 or 1440x900.

There will be a Dallas Geek Night 09/29/2010.

Some of the regular ThoughtWorkers won't be able to attend but the show will go on!

Geek Night 09/22/2010

Over 15 people at Dallas Geek Night tonight.

• Yujun paired with Paul Nelson on Yujun's CompAlgo
• Eric Smalling and  Srini worked with some JBehave stuff.
• Cosmin worked in Django/python to do a search of his twitter feed with a ThoughtWorker (Alistair).
• Michael Perry paired with Sean Lynch on Correspondence (BDD testing).
• Greg and Dhruv continued work on the SMTP testing framework with assistance from Jennifer Weingarten.
• Graham Brooks and Jonathan Wolter
• Noah Kriegel and Michael Rainey were doing something interesting (I assume) in the outer room.
• Keith Swallow helped me with enhancing the JProxyGen tests.
• Paul was making sure everyone was working on something.

Pizza again.

Geek Night 09/15/2010

We had a dozen (baker's) people in and out last night at the ThoughtWorks Dallas (Addison) office.

• Bill Schofield was working on his iPhone App and had to leave early.
• Yujun Liang and I paired briefly on the JProxyGen project I started last week--then he had to leave and I continued on alone.
• Paul Hammant was pairing with Michael Perry in C# on Michael's framework.
• Greg Heartsfield and Dhruv Chandna were continuing work in Scala on Greg's SMTP testing project.
• Dante lugged in a larger monitor and continued work on his networked video distribution project.
• Eric Smalling and Cosmin Stejerean were working in Clojure on a utility to get the classpath from the manifest of a .jar file.

There were three other people (I believe all ThoughtWorkers) present but I neglected to get their names or what they were working on.

Getting started with ASM

Byte-code manipulation is something I’ve been aware of but never thought much about actually doing myself. I never felt the need for writing my own aspect framework or even getting much out of the Java mainstream. So why am I looking at ASM? Blame Geek Night Dallas!

Previous Dallas Geek Nights

I think it will be good for me to capture general impressions of what we're doing each week at the Dallas Geek Night in a blog entry. Since some have already occurred I'll briefly summarize what I remember about them and then be a bit more diligent going forward.

August 11, 2010
First meeting of the Dallas Geek Night. I seem to remember some Java/Objective-C/Clojure(?) pairing going on. (The Objective-C was Bill Schofield's iPhone 'particle engine' app). I surrendered my laptop to let Graham Brooks lead a discussion about some of his projects.

August 18, 2010
Bill and Tim continued on the iPhone app. I think Paul and Srini paired a bit on swiby. I paired with Yujun on his Compalgo project trying to come up with a simple example. Cosmin worked on some Clojure (RSS feed reader?).

August 25, 2010
I did a bit of pairing on a C# project with Michael Perry. Greg and (the other) Richard did some Haskell. Yujun continued on Compalgo.

September 1, 2010
Paul and I paired on trying to extend LambdaJ to add an average function (it already has a sum).

September 8, 2010
Bill continued work on his iPhone app with assistance from Tim and others. Srini and I tried to understand the basics of ASM for code generation. Paul and (?) worked on a Firefox plug-in.

There is a Geek Night in Dallas!

The Dallas Geek Night meetup is sponsored by ThoughtWorks (my employer). We work on open source projects in various languages. The goal is to be able to commit something at least once per evening.

We've had people working in Java, C#, Haskell, ...

ThoughtWorks typically brings in some pizza for the attendees.