[Pdx-pm] Meeting Reminder: Next Week

[Eric Wilhelm]

Meeting July 12th, next Wednesday at 6:53pm at Free Geek.

  http://pdx.pm.org/kwiki

Topic:  hackfest / code review / structured educational chaos
Victim:  Kees Cook's  Device::SerialPort
  (possibly also Michael Rasmussen's fut (if he's brave enough))
Audience:  Beginner - Advanced

This will be a very open meeting format, with lots of participation.  
Even if you don't feel up to providing feedback, looking over someone 
else's shoulder and listening to the overviews should be interesting.  

We'll be covering lots of ground, including likely:

  o best practices
  o testing strategies
  o cross-platform issues
  o pair programming
  o agile development

How do 10-15 people hack on two codebases in a little over one hour?  
That's going to be tricky, but I'm confident that the Portland Perl 
Mongers can handle it.  Some advanced preparation is recommended.  
Further hacking over beer may be required.

Suggestions:

  Have a vnc or remote desktop server on your laptop.  Set it to a 
stupid password.  This will hopefully allow us to save time on 
switching the projector between video connections.  It may also come in 
handy if you want to pair-off.

  Read-up on the codebase ahead of time.  If you start hacking on it, 
label your changes with your initials so you can quickly cover your 
suggestions.

  Have your copy of the code in version control before we get started.  
(e.g. rcs, svn file:// or maybe darcs.)

  If you cannot bring a laptop, e-mail me your labelled and commented 
changes ahead of time.

The basic idea is that we'll put some code on the screen, maybe draw 
over it on the whiteboard (and photograph that if need be.)  It might 
also be handy to have some printouts for scribbling (I'll bring a few 
11x17's.)  This won't quite be a hackfest -- more like a constructive 
(if a little chaotic) code review.

I think we'll start with a quick (5-min) "what this code does and what I 
want it to do" from the victims, then break into chunks for about 20 
minutes, then reconvene and review the results.

I haven't tried this before, so let me know if you have some experience 
or suggestions.  I think we'll be able to learn something and have a 
lot of fun even if we only break the code worse than it already is.

--Eric
-- 
"Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse."
--Murphy's Corollary
---------------------------------------------------
    http://scratchcomputing.com
---------------------------------------------------