It's time to get your laptops out as this month as this month we will be doing a coding kata at ScotRUG, Glasgow on the 10th of May at the usual SociatyM.

As usual will gather from 6:30pm and start as soon as we can.

The night is intend for people of all levels of experience with ruby with lots of pair programming going on and hopefully general discussion.

The kata we will be attempting will be the Countdown by Brian Candler

One of the longest-running quiz shows on UK TV is called Countdown, and has a "numbers round". There are some cards laid face down in front of the host - the top row contains 'large' numbers (from the set 25, 50, 75, 100), and the rest are 'small' (1 to 10). Six cards are picked and displayed: the choice is made by one of the contestants, who typically will ask for one large number and five small ones.

Next, a machine called "Cecil" picks a target number between 100 and 999 at random. The contestants then have 30 seconds to find a way of combining the source numbers using the normal arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) to make the target number, or to get as close as possible.

Each source card can be used no more than once. The same applies to any intermediate results, although of course you don't have to explicitly show the intermediate results.

Example: source 100 5 5 2 6 8, target 522

100 * 5 = 500
5 + 6 = 11
11 * 2 = 22
500 + 22 = 522

or more succinctly, (5*100)+((5+6)*2) = 522

Another solution is (100+6)*5-8 = 522

Normal arithmetic rules apply, and in particular you are not allowed to use integer rounding. That is, 7 divided by 3 is 2 1/3, not 2.

The quiz is to write a program which will accept one target number and a list of source numbers, and generate a solution which calculates the target or a number as close to the target as possible.

As always a massive thanks to the lovely folks at Edgecase who are kindly sponsoring the venue for us.

Hope to see you there.

Colin & Pete

About Edgecase: We are a team of talented software artisans who love solving problems. Our dedicated group of developers and artists have individual expertise in areas such as usability, security, enterprise application integration, and business analysis. Passionate about software development, we are driven by the challenge of what we do.

ScotRUG in Glasgow this month will be Acceptance Testing Vietnam with Paul Wilson on the 5th of April at SociatyM.

We will gather from 6:30pm with the talk starting at 7pm.

Acceptance Testing Vietnam:

Ted Neward's 2006 essay "The Vietnam of Computer Science"[1] famously compares Object/Relational mapping to the Vietnam War: "The United States began a military project with simple yet unclear and conflicting goals, and quickly became enmeshed in a quagmire that ... brought down two governments". The analogy can equally apply to Automated Acceptance Testing: early successes lead to committing to use Cucumber Tests for all stories; more and more resources get spent covering difficult cases and maintaining fragile tests; before you know it your project is bogged down, and you are scrambling for the last helicopter off the embassy roof. In this session I will draw upon a long experience of Acceptance Testing, with Java and FIT before Cucumber. I will present on the goals of acceptance testing, when and how to use them and, as importantly, when not to use them. My aim is to help prevent your Acceptance Test suite turning from an asset into a liability. [1] http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Computer+Science.aspx

As always a massive thanks to the lovely folks at Edgecase who are kindly sponsoring the venue for us.

Hope to see you there.

Colin & Pete

About Edgecase: We are a team of talented software artisans who love solving problems. Our dedicated group of developers and artists have individual expertise in areas such as usability, security, enterprise application integration, and business analysis. Passionate about software development, we are driven by the challenge of what we do.

After a prolonged absence next month will see the return of ScotRUG in Glasgow on the 1st of March at SociatyM starting at 6:30ish.

This month we have Pete Aitken and Alan Gardner talking about Keeping it Simple:

Having seen over 50 implementations of the Trigrams Kata through years of interview process, I have spotted some common gotchas that developers often fall into. 

In this talk I will focus on how the higher quality submissions were developed and provide insight into how they could be further simplified.

The Trigrams kata can be found here http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/kata_fourteen_t.html

To get the most out of the talk I would suggest attempting it in advance.

Massive thanks to the lovely folks at Edgecase are kindly sponsoring the venue for us.

Hope to see you there.

Colin & Pete

About Edgecase: We are a team of talented software artisans who love solving problems. Our dedicated group of developers and artists have individual expertise in areas such as usability, security, enterprise application integration, and business analysis. Passionate about software development, we are driven by the challenge of what we do.

For the August meetup we will be heading back to the Goat in the west end on Thursday the 4th of August at 7pm for another open space beers night.

For those of you who may not know about open spaces beers we will start the night by asking what people want to talk about, put the subjects on post-it notes. Then vote on the subjects and the top ones wins. Each subject has a maximum of 20 minutes so should get through a few in the one night.

One last thing, as you may have noticed there was no GRUG last month as I was unfortunately unable to secure a venue in time and got extremely busy. If you know of someone who would be willing to host the group or somewhere with tables and a projector that is suitably cheep can you please send me a mail on pythonandchips{at}gmail.com. The hosting is split between one month in the pub, one in TicToc and this final venue, so its only once every 3 month.

Colin Gemmell

Addendum: ok I originally for gor to put the time on the post. Sorry and thanks to Kevin for pointing this out

Dundee-based technology design consultant and educational expert Morna Simpson (@girlgeeks) is spearheading a project which aims to re-open recently closing doors to education; share and network learning opportunities regionally and in a way that is possible for everyone.

The aim to build a system that supports "Affordable, Accessible Education for All" and to build a large scale fully functional system and launch a business over 3 weekends based on the concept of ‘Hack-Days’. They are looking for ruby and rails developer of all levels to help build the system.

For more information you can check out http://www.38minutes.co.uk/group/wanted/forum/topics/tech-talent-sought-for or contact Moria, morna{at}flockedu.com or Andy Cobley, acobley{at}computing.dundee.ac.uk

Sounds like its going to be an amazing few weekends of coding and innovation and hope to see the ruby community really get behind it.

Cheers

Colin

As you may have heard 55degrees recently went into liquidation recently (http://blog.55degrees.co.uk/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish-god-love). I wish them all the best in there future endevours.

However the has thrown up a small problem for the next GRUG as 55 degrees where slated to host the event on the 7th of July, so I am looking for some help for our next meet up. If you or someone you know has space where we could hold our next event can you please get in touch with me as soon as possible at pythonandchips@gmial.com. All we really need is some chair and a projector for our next event.

The plan for next month is for Joe Wright to lead one of his excellent coding dojos (http://code.joejag.com/2009/the-coding-dojo) 

Cheers
Colin

And we are back! Next month we a have an excellent talk by Alan Gardner (@mr_urf) who will be taking on test-driving your personal development.

TicToc have graciously agreed to host the group in there Glasgow office, 14 Newton Terrace just off Sauchiehall Street.

Hope to see you all there.

Abstract:-

As software developers we all spend a lot of time learning. We have to learn new languages, new tools, new methods and new problem domains on a regular basis. But, are we learning efficiently?

During this talk we’ll look at our personal development and see how we can use the TDD Red-Green-Refactor cycle to level up more efficiently than before.

Plan for the evening:-

  7:00pm - Quitck intro

  7:05pm - Alan Gardner, Level Up! Test-driving your personal development

  7:50pm - Open discussion

  8:30pm - To The Pub!!!!!

About TicToc

Based in Glasgow and London tictoc is a strategic digital agency designing and building commercially successful internet sites, digital marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns and software applications

The next Glasgow ruby group meeting will be a bit later next month and will on the 13/04/2011 in the Dargle Room at Waxy O'Connor's starting at 7pm.

As suggested at our first meetup we will be holding a retrospective on the Scottish Ruby Conference.

If you went to the conference or want to here the buzz we will be share new idea's, changed perspective or just something you thought was really cool that came out from the conference.

On another quick note I am still looking for a more permanent venue. If you know of anyone who would be willing to host our events please ask them get in touch or pass me on there contact details.

Hope to see ya all there

Colin Gemmell

For those of you who where unable to make it to the first Glasgow ruby user group we had the lovely people of MyPolice (http://www.mypolice.org/) along look for a Ruby on Rails developer. 

If your interested in doing something new and working with some really great people checkout the job spec (http://mypolice.org/blog/?p=195).

So the first Glasgow Ruby User Group is set and ready to go.

It will take place on Thursday the 3rd of March at The Goat in Glasgows West End from 7pm onwards. I have booked the snug which is upstairs on the left.

For the first evening we will look to do an open spaces style discussion on anything and everything ruby. So if you have something you want to talk about or discuss put them in a comment below and I'll bring them along on the night (if you have nothing to talk about come along anyway the beer will be nice).

I would also like to hear what people would want in future event e.g. katas, koans, straight up talks or anything that your creative mind can come up with.

Hope to see lots of people there.

Colin Gemmell