XP in Cincinnati

The Cincinnati XP Users group meets on the first tuesday of every month. At the meetings we "practice" our XP skills by pairing and working a small web project for Childrens Hospital. The project is a simple scheduler for reserving rooms.

Most of the meetings we have about 4 or 5 pairs of java programmers and one pair of Ruby programmers (the Ruby pair is usually me and Chris). Working on the project for only a few hours a month means that very little gets done at the meeting, but that’s ok because the meeting is more about learning the process that getting software delivered.

But working on the same project for over a year is getting a bit old, and the group was looking for something new to work on.

The January Meeting

I didn’t make the January meeting, so I only got this news second hand. Here is a portion of the meeting summary that Mark Windholtz published. As you read this, keep in mind that the group has been exposed to Ruby over the past year, but only a couple of them had actually paired with me and had direct exposure to the language.

So what’s next for the group? We talked about goals. do we want to …

1. focus on delivery?
2. focus on experimentation (with an eye toward adding buzz words to our resumes)?
3. do something wacky and fun?
4. something else …?

We kicked that around a little.

Bill suggested that they were not exclusive goals and said we could have fun while delivering.

Somehow we started talking about PHP and Rails. We watched a 10 min Rails video that took 12 minutes to download on the slow line. (you gotta see this!)

media.nextangle.com/rails/rails_setup.mov

If you have not seen the Ruby on Rails 10 minute demo movie, it is worth downloading and watching. Really, it is only 10 minutes (not counting download time).

Continuing with Mark’s summary.…

It blew us away how easy it was to build a minimal web app in 10 minutes.

After the video Bill announced that he had a Rails server installed and running.

Gerard commented that it took us 2-3 meetings to get Tomcat configured for peoples PCs, While it took Bill about 20 minutes to get a page showing in an unfamiliar technology.

Skipping over some discussion stuff …

So it turned out unanimous that we would load-up on Rails and next month start developing something. […] I think this is going to be huge amounts of fun.

I think its going to be fun too. I can’t wait until the next meeting. That’s a big part of the Ruby attraction. It puts the fun back in programming.

Invitation

If you are interested in Ruby, either a beginner or an expert, feel free to drop by the next Cincy-XP Users Group meeting on February 1. See www.objectwind.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?MeetingTimeAndLocation if you need help finding us.

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