September 17th Meetup Announced!

[Nick Plante]

So Casey has been telling me how much fun our Portland-based comrades
have been having with the RubyGames concept, so we’re gonna try that
out this month in Portsmouth.

Wait. What? Games? Yup.

Ruby Games will test your programming and reasoning skills by
presenting you with puzzle challenges to solve in code. I’ve already
worked up one puzzle problem for the group (a word jumble problem),
and Casey will be coming up with a second one. We’ll have people pair
up to work on these, so don’t worry at all if you don’t have a lick of
Ruby programming experience. In fact, I’d say that Ruby skills aren’t
nearly as important as basic reasoning skills and inventiveness are.

Sounds good, right? But it gets better! By participating, you’ll learn
(whether you like it or not) about:

* Basic Ruby syntax — an engaging but simple introduction to
language basics and an opportunity to do hands-on learning with your
peers.

* Test-Driven Development — you’ll be writing a solution, or an
implementation, to a pre-defined spec we will supply. witness the
power!

* Pair programming — we’ll be pairing people up, because two heads
are better than one (right?)

* Algorithm runtime efficiency — once you’ve solved the problem,
we’ll take a look at how fast your solutions run and compare
approaches.

You’ll have fun. And you’ll learn something. It comes with a money-
back guarantee. And free pizza, too. Mark your calendars for next
Thursday September 17th at 7PM and join us at RMC Research in
Portsmouth. I think it just might be the best NH.rb of the year.

For more information and directions please visit
http://nhruby.org/2009/9/9/september-meetup-ruby-games

RSVPs are appreciated (leave a comment on the blog or the meetup.com
group) as it helps us gauge how much pizza to buy ;-).