Re: Next Meeting, Format Change.

[Michael Bevilacqua-Linn <michael.bevilacqualinn@gmail.com>]

Hey Dustin,

Yeah I think someone else had mentioned that they wanted to do something similar with SICP at the end of the last functional fall meeting.  I'd be interesting in seeing if we could figure out a way to do one of those in parallel with the 'normal' meetings, possibly with a smaller, set group.  We'd probably have to meet once a week or so though.

Anyone else have thoughts, questions, etc on the proposed format change?

Thanks,
MBL

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Dustin Getz <dustin.getz@gmail.com> wrote:

functional fall was a breath of fresh air, i've never read papers before, this was awesome and something i will continue on my own time. that said, i think many of us are itching to apply all our new understanding to "do something". i would be all about taking a session or two to play with a few frameworks in various languages, to get a more hands on feel for their strengths and their community.

fwiw, i am slowly working my way through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. I've done the Ruby section, it's an awesome hands-on primer, and it left me right at the point where I know enough to do something nontrivial, like build upon Kyle's continuations demo from October. The point is, the book gets the hello worlds out of the way offline, and leaves us in an ideal spot for an interesting live discussion that is harder to grok from a book.

i don't know how well with a large group due to requiring ~3 hours homework, but maybe it is worth considering.

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Michael Bevilacqua-Linn <michael.bevilacqualinn@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey folks,

Thanks for everyone who came out to Functional Fall, it was a blast!

I'm working on getting our next meeting ironed out, more details and a doodle with possible dates to follow shortly.

After our next meeting, I'd like to start mixing things up a bit.  Functional Fall was still going strong up until the end, and we had a bunch of papers that went unread.  I was thinking that we could split things up between the normal presentations, paper reading groups, and tutorials.

The presentations would be the same thing that we've been doing from the start, (well, actually I guess the first meeting was at a Sugar Moms, but I digress).

Paper reading groups would follow the same pattern that the Functional Fall meetings followed.  We'd pick a paper, pick a discussion lead and a notetaker, and go from there.

Tutorials might spans 2 or 3 days over a week or two, and would be focused on introducing a language/framework/technique, etc.  These would be something like an introduction to Clojure/Haskell, or a macro tutorial.  They would be hands on, and participants would be encouraged to bring their laptops.  They would be led by a tutorial leader who would prepare a bit of a lesson and would hopefully be able to help get folks up and running with a development environment if needed.

So what say you all?  Good idea?  Bad idea?  Questions/comments/concerns?

Thanks,

MBL