Software Hamilton

CoderCamp continued at a monthly pace in August, as a group of software developers looking to learn from one another met up in the downstairs lounge of Accalamation on Thursday August 2nd for the 3rd CoderCamp. Brian Graham (BrianJGraham) summarized the talks at CoderCamp3 as follows…

Andrew Scruz (@AsSeenFromSpace) brought laughter to everyone in the room as he walked us through Lolcode!

He thrilled us with programs that looked very much like:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
	YARLY
		BTW this is true
		VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
	NOWAI
		BTW this is false
		VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
	KTHX
KTHXBYE

…and they actually ran. In Python. All around, a hilarious presentation on esoteric languages.

Kevin Browne (@hamiltonkb) shifted our programming gears from our more comfortable programming paradigm into the world of Functional Programming in Haskell.

He demonstrated that through the expressive power that comes with Haskell we’re able to write succinct code in a much less error-prone way. Hundreds of lines of code can be reduced to tens of lines, pending you have taken on the learning curve for a new way to think about writing code.

For anyone interested in learning, he highly recommends the book Real World Haskell, which focuses more heavily on practical applications over academic purpose.

John Fink (@adr) was out with his Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and a few other devices.

He gave us a great overview of how these things are built, programmed, and have been driving DIY culture at such places as Hamilton’s Think|Haus, and gave us examples of just a few things that are possible with these tiny yet powerful devices.

He gave a great presentation which is hosted on his Github page.

CoderCamp4 will take place on Thursday September 6th from 6:30pm – 9:00pm in the downstairs lounge of Accalamation, if you’re a software developer in the Hamilton area we encourage you to sign up here to attend. Anyone looking to give a talk on a software development tool, technology or technique is welcome to do so that evening, and if you let us know in advance at info@codercamp.org we’ll throw up your talk details on the EventBrite in advance. Also at this next CoderCamp in addition to the usual gauntlet of talks, based on a suggstion at the last CoderCamp we’re asking people to bring your laptop and come prepared to show off your “workbench” – what IDE, text editor, test framework, etc do you use? What tools do you use to develop software and why?