[LRUG] For the agenda of the June meeting: a humble offering for your consideration

[Murray Steele]

Hi all,

Just to remind you that the next meeting will be on Monday 14th June.  I'm
just starting to sort out talks for it, but I wanted to offer up a talk that
I'd like to give.  The talk is called "My First Ruby" and in it I will show
off the first ruby script I ever wrote.

I think you might enjoy this because:

1. It's a mailing list with a web front-end.  The web stuff is pre-rails and
I think it's interesting in terms of "look how far we've come".  Seriously,
if you've never done web development without a higher-level framework like
rails you'll be amazed.  (For anyone who's heard of it, it uses NARF).

2. I can pretty much guarantee* that my first ruby code is worse than your
first ruby code.  So for any newbies in the room, it should come as welcome
relief that even apparent old-hands like myself have written terrible code
(and it truly is terrible code), made terrible design decisions, and done
both without the safety net of TDD.  Of course, hopefully in the talk I'll
point out why, if writing this again, I would use TDD.  At the end I hope
this talk will make people feel less embarrassed about showing off code of
their own at future events; I'll be setting a base-level of awfulness.

3. This bit of software was written in a weekend and has been in
"production" for  7 years 11 months (according to the date I filled in for
"when I first started using Ruby" on my Working With Rails profile) and it's
been remarkably stable and unchanged for those 7 years.  I've no real
evidence for this, but it's a scientific fact that it's the longest running
piece of ruby software in the world... wouldn't you like to see inside it?

So, can I give it?

Muz


* not a guarantee**

** it is a bit
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