REMINDER: Meetup Tuesday March 6 6pm at New Relic downtown 27th floor

[Tim Loudon]

Hello All!

I hope everyone had fabulous snow days—sounds like we might be in line for another one too.  Warning: we are getting a little stir crazy at the Loudon household, and this email may have suffered as a result.

First note!  We are doing presentations starting at 6:30 not 7.

Second note!  There will be a special networking/socializing with strangers area.  It’s optional, but will be fun/so great.

We have a top-notch meeting planned for the Tuesday after next.  This will feature technical talks on Enumerators (specifically with 3rd party APIs) and Ruby+Rust by Zach Kemp and Lee Baillie respectively.  I’m really excited for this!

I think we’ve all got at least a few methods calling some SaaS or another that doesn’t quite give us the search filters we need (or maybe we just love teh data), so we end up doing quite a bit of pagination.  I hear there are some slick tricks we can employ to streamline our code here and maybe clean up some of our memory leaks.  If this were Java, we’d make up an indecipherable pattern name for it.  Any suggestions?

Wow, so I’ve heard just a ton of exciting/intriguing/confusing/promising info about Go and Elixir and Haskell (for great good!) and Erlang and all those JVM languages (Scala, Clojure, Kotlin (kind of)) and whatever JavaScript is now (I am purposefully excluding .NET even though it’s supposed to be cool and open source now).  So many LANGUAGES OF THE FUTURE!  Lucky for us, there’s also Rust which apparently we can use with Ruby even though it’s “dead”.  Hooray!  

j/k we are talking about Paul Graham’s arc lang.

Seriously though, are my jokes getting any better?

Returning to Rust.  A few things you may have missed:

1) it’s not just an awesome new general purpose language; but a systems language designed to replace C/C++.  Emphasis on speed and safety, ie no segfaults.  You can write drivers with this people!

2) high level features!  If you haven’t seen the fast_blank in Rust demo, check it out — http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/ .  Notice the Rust code looks pretty close to Ruby.  At least way more Ruby, than ptr C.  It’s natural and intuitive yet still very fast—no hand optimized ASM!

3) Helix — add Rust to Ruby easily!  Expectations: https://tenderlovemaking.com/2009/12/18/writing-ruby-c-extensions-part-1.html 

Reality: https://mobile.twitter.com/tenderlove/status/905248150323060736. While C being !awesome is not a Helix feature per se, at least it’s shinier and newer!  Kidding, Helix actually looks really nice, and I’m personally hoping to use it in a project within the next few weeks — https://usehelix.com/getting_started#step-2-generate-a-helix-crate

4) Tilde and Yehuda Katz endorsed.  Seriously people, this is awesome.  If it’s good enough for the guy who was like ALL THE CORE TEAMS (jQuery, Merb/Rails, Ember, Rust + yarn), it’s maybe worth taking a peek at!

If you add all of that up: a paradigm-breaking language that’s thinking in decades not hype cycles + a nice Rubyesque DX + easy compatibility with Ruby + endorsement from local legends.  This is pretty much must see language.  On top of this, our presenter Lee is a professional comic artist (think _why inspired awesomeness), has spoken at Rust conf, and you don’t even need a third reason.  This is must see people.  Must.  See.  (No pressure Lee).

Hope to see you all there.

Best,

Tim

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Tim Loudon

971.266.1649

loudonco.com