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by John Wilger.
Original Post: XP Cincinnati - Feb, '05 Meeting
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After tracking their mailing list for a few months, I finally made it down to the monthly meeting of XP Cincinnati, an eXtreme Programming users group. I’ll admit that one of the reasons I finally got off my duff to go is that the group is interested in dropping their previous Java-centered approach and picking up Ruby—my new language of love.
As one of the few people who attended that are already proficient in Ruby, I actually met with a couple of the members last week to discuss the approach we would take to getting the rest of the group up to speed with the language. We agreed to spend two months going over Ruby basics (which isn’t a lot of time considering we only have a 3-hour meeting once a month) and then in April the group will decide what direction to take as far as product development.
The first meeting of the Ruby series seemed to go pretty well. We started off with some introductions and general discussion of the Ruby language and how it compares to other languages such as C/C++, Java, Smalltalk, Groovy, etc. Jim Weirich then walked the group through an exercise to build their first (well, for most of them) Ruby program.
Based on a recent quiz on the ruby-talk mailing list, each participant was to create a class that could play the classic game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Before the meeting, Jim set up a framework that would pit the “players” against each other and report on the scores. The server and player classes used a combination of DRb and Rinda, so the player classes would actually run on the participants’ machines.
After this mini-intro to the language, the group was queried as to the topics they would be interested in hearing about over the course of the next few meetings. Next month, we will begin talking about Rails (the web framework that got the group interested in Ruby to begin with) and will start to cover some of the group’s suggested topics.
If you’re ever in the Cincinnati, OH area on the first Tuesday of the month, and you’re interested in learning more about either eXtreme Programming or Ruby, I’d highly recommend coming to the meeting. (And—if that’s not enough—there’s free pizza!)
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