[ UK Smalltalk User Group ]

A quick note to remind you that there we'll be skipping the December meeting - we'll meet again in 2011, on January 31st, at the usual location . Happy holidays!

For those of you who just can't get enough Smalltalk, next week offers two events in London. Remember that our UKSTUG meeting has been moved a week earlier this month and is taking place on Monday, November 22. Michael Lucas-Smith will be visiting us and speaking about Xtreams, a new open-source stream/iterator framework (see the detailed announcement ). On the following day, Tuesday, November 23, Cincom is running another of the popular Wolf Pack Programming™ workshops in conjunction with SPA and XTC . What is Wolf Pack Programming? From the event page: Cloud computing is this year's hot topic. But what are the implications for agile application development? By moving the whole development environment to the cloud, we are no longer limited by the number of people who can comfortably fit around a single workstation; suddenly an entire team of programmers can work together on the same live code base. In this hands-on session, we experiment with a process inspired by the h

In order to welcome Michael Lucas-Smith and Helge Nowak, who will be visiting London this month, we've moved our November monthly meeting one week earlier to Monday, November 22. Michael has offered to give us an in-depth presentation on Xtreams , a streaming framework with a new and refreshingly consistent API. From the project page: Xtreams is a generalized stream/iterator framework providing [a] simple, unified API for reading from different kinds of sources and writing into different kinds of destinations (Collections, Sockets, Files, Pipes, etc). Streams themselves can be sources or destinations as well. This allows to stack streams on top of each other. It is the stacking nature of the streams that give this framework its real power and, from what Michael and Martin (Kobetic) have shown me, you can do some pretty impressive stuff. Martin's presentation at ESUG only scratched the surface, apparently, and Michael intends to delve even deeper. There will also be plenty of ti

The September UK STUG meeting will be this Monday, September 27th. We'll meet at our usual venue - the Counting House, close to Bank station - from 18:30 onwards. For once we have no agenda - we'll share a few pints and debate the latest Smalltalk news. See you there!

The August UK STUG meeting will happen on Monday, August 23rd. We'll meet at our usual venue - the Counting House , close to Bank station - from 18:30 onwards. Bruce Badger will give us a talk about PostgreSQL and how to use it from any Smalltalk dialect. As it's our tradition we'll also share a few pints and debate the latest Smalltalk news. See you there!

After surviving the success of Camp Smalltalk London 2010 , the London smalltalkers will gather again for their usual monthly meetup. The July UK STUG meeting will be next Monday, July 26th. The venue the Counting House , close to Bank station, from 18:30 onwards. A sign will direct you to our reserved area; you can also ask the bar staff for directions in case you can't find us. We'll share a few pints, debate the latest Smalltalk news and start planning for some more Smalltalk-related events. See you there!

Camp Smalltalk London was a great success! We had nearly 40 people attending from all over the UK, Europe, and even the United States. Attendees shared information, made new connections, learned Smalltalk or Seaside, and made real progress on their projects. I'd like to thank Cincom for sponsoring the Saturday evening "ice bar" social, Pinesoft for providing the venue, Instantiations and ESUG for keeping us fed and hydrated during the day, and Sourcesense for providing the conference badges. Also, I'd like to thank and congratulate everyone who put their efforts into organizing the event. Certainly their participating made this a much more enjoyable event. We're already working to finalize a date for Camp Smalltalk London 2011 about a year from now and are considering organizing some other similar events in the meantime. More details will be available soon. Those without prior Smalltalk experience had a great time in the tutorials and we plan to maintain this for

Off the top, just a couple of updates: first of all, thank you to ESUG for agreeing to sponsor the tea, milk, biscuits, etc. throughout the weekend; secondly, we've had a couple of cancellations, so there are again a few spots free. Sign up on our event page . Cincom has finalized Saturday dinner plans for us at the ABSOLUT Icebar and belowzero restaurant + lounge in the West End.   From the website: ABSOLUT ICEBAR LONDON is the UK's only permanent bar made of ice and is kept at minus 5 degrees all year round. Everything inside is made out of crystal clear ice harvested especially from the frozen Torne River in Jukkasjarvi, Northern Sweden. Even the drink glasses are made of ice! When not in the Icebar, we'll be enjoying food, drinks, and good conversation in the Reindeer Lounge, complete with its own private bar.

The June UK STUG meeting will be next Monday, June 28th. As usual, we'll meet at the Counting House , close to Bank station, from 18:30 onwards. We'll share a few pints, and (amongst other topics) we'll finalize the last details for next month's Camp Smalltalk . See you there!

Instantiations has come on board as a lunch sponsor for Camp Smalltalk London . They will be making sure we have the energy to keep on coding, talking, and learning throughout the day on Saturday. Thank you! We still have room for a couple more people at the event, so go sign up if you're interested.

Much to our delight, there seems to be a lot of interest in the Camp Smalltalk event in London. We originally estimated our capacity at 30, and those slots have already filled up in less than 4 days! We are just now discussing what our actual maximum capacity is. We'll be able to handle a few more people, we're just now sure yet how many. So if you're interested in coming and haven't signed up yet, please head over to cslondon2010.eventbrite.com and add yourself to the waiting list. That will really help us understand how many more people still want to attend. Note that joining the waiting list does not commit you to attending, so if you're still on the fence, you might want to sign yourself up anyway. We'll open up some more spots next week and then see how it goes. Thanks for your enthusiastic participation!

The UK Smalltalk User Group would like to invite everyone to attend Camp Smalltalk London this July 16-18. The Pharo team will be holding one of their regular coding sprints and, in true Camp Smalltalk spirit, other Smalltalkers will be gathering together to do some productive work on their projects. In addition, we want to welcome those who just want to learn more about Smalltalk, so we'll be holding an introductory tutorial on the first morning. We'll have you writing Smalltalk by lunch! If there's interest, we'll follow up with a Seaside tutorial the next day. So whatever your level of experience, this is a great chance to meet other developers, network, discuss ideas, write code, and have some fun. Cincom is generously treating us to dinner on Saturday at a unique London restaurant and Pinesoft will be opening up their spectacular London offices for the daytime activities. We are still finalizing some of the details but we wanted to announce the dates as soon a

The UK Smalltalk User Group will be meeting tonight at the Counting House . We'll be discussing the details of an event to be held in London this coming July. See you there from 18:30 onwards!

Hi, just a quick reminder that the April UK STUG meeting will then be on Monday, April 26th. As usual, we'll meet at the Counting House , close to Bank station, from 18:30 onwards. We have no set agenda for this meeting, but some of us will be talking about organizing a Smalltalk event in London for this coming Summer. See you there!

A public calendar of UK Smalltalk events is now available. Look for it on the sidebar of this blog, or import it in your calendar application.

Hi all, after a brief hiatus, we're ready to resume our monthly meetings. We decided to move the nominal date of our meeting to the last Monday of the month, to minimize clashes with other user group meetings. The next UK STUG meeting will then be on Monday, March 29th. As usual, we'll meet at the Counting House , close to Bank station, from 18:30 onwards. We have no set agenda for the meeting - just beer and nosh with your fellow Smalltalkers. On the other hand, the Counting House now has free wifi, so why not bring your laptop and show us your latest code? See you there!