Skip to main content

Wolf Pack Programming in London: Tuesday, November 23

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 hunting strategies of wolves to see whether we can successfully take agile's much vaunted pair programming even further.

To facilitate the exercise, we will use a web-based development environment, which enables multiple people to jointly develop in a running Smalltalk image. The product, however, is merely an enabling tool; the focus of this evening is not on the technology but rather on the benefits and challenges of the "wolf pack" process itself. With all team members able to update the code simultaneously, integration is constant and the deployability status can be determined in real time. Will this make Continuous Integration Servers look slow or will it lead to disaster? To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we will ask our wolf packs to complete a series of tasks following the process.

If you'd like to join in, make sure to visit the detailed event page for more information and register. Did we the mention the drinks are free after the event?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TruffleSqueak: A Squeak/Smalltalk System for the GraalVM - Wednesday, June 24th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, June 24th. Fabio Niephaus  will talk to us about TruffleSqueak , a Squeak/Smalltalk VM and Polyglot Programming Environment for the GraalVM . He is a Ph.D. student within the Software Architecture Group  at the Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany. He has strong interests in dynamic programming languages, virtual execution environments, and software development tools. Fabio will talk about the motivation for his research in the field of Polyglot Programming. With a live demo, he will show how TruffleSqueak can be used as a polyglot IDE for other languages such as Java, Javascript, Python, R, or Ruby. He will also introduce us to the GraalVM ecosystem and discuss his experience in writing a Smalltalk VM in Truffle, GraalVM's language implementation framework. Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advanc

Craig Latta - WebAssembly as a Smalltalk Compilation Target (v1) - 22 February 2023

WebAssembly (WASM) is an instruction format for portable high-performance code, run by a stack-based virtual machine. To Smalltalkers, this sounds very familiar. WASM is supported by the three most popular web browsers, and by other host platforms as well. Perhaps we can translate certain Smalltalk compiled methods to WASM, augmenting our support for physical processors and for livecoding the Web. For our February meeting, Craig Latta will describe his initial experiments, using the Epigram compilation framework. Craig Latta is a research computer scientist in Berkeley and Amsterdam, with interests including livecoding, music performance, and interactive visualization. The discovery of a mysteriously-placed copy of the Blue Book at university led to stints at several exploratory labs, and a pursuit of improvisation wherever code is found. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup page  to receive th

A Tour of Architectural Abstraction with Objective-S - Wednesday, November 24th

This month, the UKSTUG will take a look at Objective-S , an architecture-oriented programming language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C, by hosting his creator Marcel Weiher. As per Alan Kay, “Code seems large and complicated for what it does” . Objective-S addresses one source of this accidental complexity: using software architectural abstraction to directly expresses the much wider variety of architectural styles typical of modern software systems, compared to traditional programming languages that still follow the call/return architectural style of scientific programs from the early days of computing. Marcel Weiher started his forays into dynamic object-oriented computing by implementing Objective-C on his Amiga 35 years ago and hasn’t stopped since. Stops on the way have been at Apple, the BBC, Microsoft and various startups, as well as contributing to Squeak. He is currently a principal software engineer at Citymapper and PhD student at HPI, where he is trying to distill some