August 2010 Meetup

We didn’t do much hacking, but we discussed a lot of great topics:

• Why the Lucky Stiff
• whyday
• Hackety Hack
• Shoes
• _why’s talk at Art && Code
• The Rails Tutorial book which is getting rave reviews all around
• Bespin
• Heroku and my personal war stories of Ruby web deployment in the days before Heroku made it a cinch
• Vim
• Ruby. Duh.
• Peepcode
• TDD/BDD which drove @crnixon to drink for the first time in a long time
• ruby-warrior
• Scratch
• Triangle Hackerspace
• Tech Shop RDU

We also got to welcome @greenideas back after a year in San Francisco.

Kaxxt, and an invitation

So, the original plan for this meetup was to hack on our own versions of a game idea called Kaxxt that _why proposed in 2009. Kaxxt is “explained” in this video, starting at 26:00. But, we never got around to the actual hacking part, what with all the talking and drinking. (Well, okay, not that much drinking.) But at least a couple of us seemed excited about working up our own interpretations of the game.

So, the new plan, for what it’s worth, is to work on it for the next meetup and have lightning talk presentations about our implementations. All and sundry, of course, are invited to participate. The more the better, really. It’s not necessary to have attended the August meetup.

Half the fun of implementing Kaxxt will probably be in interpreting _why’s description of the game. I’m certain that he never intended his talk to be construed as a requirements document. And thank goodness for that. So, watch his talk and then have fun with the idea. Make it playable, make it a simulation, write it with JavaScript and Node.js, do whatever. Then share with us what you did in September, if you’re so inclined.

Next Up: September

We’ll hopefully have a talk about a subject I’m really interested in at the moment. It’s not confirmed, so I can’t quite announce it just yet. (How’s that for a cliffhanger.) We’ll also have the aforementioned Kaxxt lightning talks.

Finally, I wanted to share this great quote, from _why’s aforementioned Art && Code talk:

Programming itself is a game. It is. It feels like that. When you’ve got these things coming in and you’re messing them around and plugging them into each other… what a wonderful thing. There’s strategy to it. And just by nature it’s a game.

We just have to add some drawings.