Last night I attended my first Ruby Brigade Meetup in Toronto and I have to admit…it was kinda fun!
It was graciously hosted at Influitive’s downtown office on Adelaide St. When I got there I was happy to see some fancy boardrooms and a bunch of pairing stations for us to use. All in all, a great location.
We got a little caught up in some general technology discussions so as expected we got started a little late. However, after some intros and idea pitches we broke off into groups and started coding.
My group was small and had a couple of people that were just getting started in ruby development. We decided we’d break off into pairs and implement Conway’s Game of Life in Ruby.
Since I’m relatively new to pairing, I found it a little difficult to get started without hogging or yielding the keyboard too much. If you haven’t tried it, I’d really recommend it!
After running out to grab a few beers for the task at hand (a requirement I’m told), we ultimately managed to get the cell checking piece working and the basic shell of the application tested in just over an hour. We focused on the interface and worked through the problem one step at a time, refactoring along the way.
This is how wicked Ruby is: The guy I was working with wasn’t even a developer, but by the end he was writing code!!!
There was only one problem…we didn’t finish it! I don’t know about you, but I hate leaving things undone, so when I woke up this morning (way too early), I decided I’d sit down and belt out some working code.
If anyone’s interested, I’ve thrown my solution up on GitHub. Feel free to publicly berate/shame me or poke holes in my logic! – I could use the help!