Who Came
- Clark Archer
- Elridge D’Mello
- Greg Symons
- Ron Romero
- Steve Suehs
- Sukant Hajra
What we did
Our original plan was to possibly play around with NetKernel, and see what it can do, but no one really knew how to get started, so we decided to work the Roman Numerals Kata instead. We thought about working it in Clojure, but, in a recurring theme, we quickly realized that none of us (with the exception of Steve, who took off early) knew how to get started. So we fell back to working in Java.
While we worked it there was an interesting discussion about TDD itself. Sukant brought up his concern that “militant” TDD amounts to a hill-climbing algorithm, and while it may converge very quickly on a locally optimal solution for a class, it can easily miss architectural concerns that can’t be easily driven by the tests themselves. As a group, we didn’t really reach a consensus, but it was a good discussion.
All the code is on GitHub
Things for future meetings
If we want to work in new languages or experiment with unfamiliar technologies, someone needs to take ownership of figuring out how to get started, and possibly come up with a problem to solve with the technology.
Next Meeting
Our next meeting will be held on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 from 6pm-10pm. We will be looking into working with genetic algorithms. Please sign up if you plan on coming.