Summmary of lispvan October 2005 meeting
Friday, October 21, 2005
First of all, I'd like to know who scheduled a
Canucks hockey game for
the same night as our lispvan meeting? :-(
Our
usual venue was invaded by a hoard of hockey fans who proceeded to
cheer loudly every time anybody made any attempt at a goal. This, of course,
made a less than optimal environment for recording
Ken Dickey's
presentation "eXtreme Common Lisp" in which he recounted his
experiences using the combination of
Extreme Programming and
LispWorks CL to create some
Extremely Successful Software.
Unfortunately, I'm not able to give a link to the audio of his talk as promised (you'll
hear more of the hockey game than Ken!); however, there is a
PDF available. Thank you very much to Ken for the
interesting presentation and for his fortitude in continuing with the
presentation under some pretty tough conditions!
We had another good turnout for this month's meeting. In addition to
Ken Dickey, there were a
bunch of the usual regulars (myself, Pietro Campesato, Taras Glek,
Dean Giberson, Graydon Hoare) and a few new faces:
- Ryan Yeske: working on an Emacs IRC client, has a degree in Cognitive Science from Simon Fraser University, also interested in CL & Scheme
- Ryan Golbeck: a CS major and grad student at the University of British Columbia, primarily interested in Scheme
- Josh Giesbrecht: works with Dean Giberson at Electronic Arts (I was at the other end of the table from Josh and, unfortunately, didn't get a chance to chat with him)
- Located centrally in Vancouver
- Reasonably quiet
- Suitable for a group of around 10 (if we continue to have new faces show up at each meeting, we might need to increase that estimate!)
- Beer/food available either on premises or nearby
- Ideally, would either have a VGA projector available or a room that
would be suitable for the
use of one. Related to this point:
- Anyone have any suggestions for low-cost, rental, or loaner VGA projectors?
- Anyone have a flat-screen monitor that they could bring to the meetings so that we could project presentations onto a non-laptop screen? (We currently spend too much time fitzing around with networking laptops together. We also have way too much hardware scattered around at these meetings and I've heard rumours that laptops and beer are not a very good combination ;-))
