Lambda Lounge

Egads, it’s September already. We have a great meeting planned at the Lambda Lounge this week. First, we’ll have a special guest, Michael Goldwasser, the Director of Computer Science at SLU, stopping by to talk to us about how they picked a language for teaching CS1 at SLU. I’m very much looking forward to learning more and discussing a topic that has been covered several times on our mailing list.

Second, Nate Neff will be doing an overview of org-babel in Emacs for polyglot literate programming. Should be loads of polyglot fun!

Please join us Thursday, September 2nd, 6 pm at the Appistry offices as usual…

Tomorrow night (Thursday Aug 19th, 6 pm) will be the first Node.js meetup at OCI’s offices at 12140 Woodcrest Executive Dr. St.Louis, MO 63141. To get there head west on Olive Blvd. from 270 and take the second right at Commerce Bank. OCI’s offices are right behind the bank. From the entrance, take the stairs to the second floor and take a left down the hallway to room 220.

Peter Griess (from Yahoo) will be giving a presentation on the Web Worker api and James Carr will give a quick introduction to npm. There will also be room for a few lightning talks and discussions as well, so feel free to share what you’ve been doing with node.js or ask questions.

We have some hard-core geekery lined up for the August meeting this Thursday night. Tim Dalton will be bringing his Scala mastery to perennial subject of monads. Personally, I’m curious on his position as to whether monads are or are not burritos.

In addition, we’ll have a talk by Darren Cruse about NetKernel, which is a platform for building “resource-oriented” systems. NetKernel makes strong claims about their ability to create a decoupled scalable architecture that remind me of the best parts of Erlang and SOA. I’m looking forward to hearing what Darren has to tell us.

This month’s meeting is sponsored by Comsys! Many thanks to them for their help.

You didn’t think you could get out of doing your homework just because it was summer did you?

We’ll kick off the Lambda Lounge meeting on July 1st with the first (and hopefully not the last) edition of the NOSQL Summer St. Louis meeting. The idea behind NOSQL Summer is to get groups of people together in different cities to read important and influential papers related to NOSQL databases.

For this first edition, we’ll be discussing the Amazon Dynamo paper that lays out the architecture for Amazon’s Dynamo storage architecture underlying many Amazon web services. Note: this is not a “talk”, but a discussion. If you haven’t done your homework by reading the paper, you may or may not have any clue what we’re talking about. We’ll discuss the components that make up Dynamo’s storage system, how those components make tradeoffs between each other and compared to other storage systems, and some open questions about why a Dynamo-like system might be useful for you. We will conclude with some discussion about whether the readings should continue, where/how that can happen, and what to read next.

Following the discussion (presuming there is time), Alex Miller will present a short talk on concurrency in Groovy with GPars.

Meeting is 6 pm at Appistry, as usual… We are still seeking a pizza sponsor for the July meeting!

It’s that time again – the June meeting of Lambda Lounge is this Thursday, 6 pm at Appistry HQ as usual.  This month’s pizza is brought to you by NetEffects.  Many thanks to them!!

We have two great talks lined up.  First we have Scott Bale on ”JavaScript Functions : The Good Parts - Idioms for Inheritance and Encapsulation” talking about things such as:

• the ‘this’ keyword – what object it’s bound to depends on how the function is invoked
• JavaScript module pattern
• JavaScript prototypes
• JavaScript inheritance – pseudoclassical versus prototypal

Second, we have Aditya Siram bringing us web apps built in Haskell without all that jazz you typically use in Java.

Coming up in July, we’ll incubate a kick-off meeting of the NoSQL Summer reading group, talking about the famous Amazon Dynamo paper.  Please read the paper before the meeting if at all possible (the paper itself is only 14 pages and kickstarted many of the “NoSQL” databases around today).  If you have any interest in leading discussions, attending follow up meetings apart from Lambda Lounge, or getting involved with this idea, please sign up for the email list on the NoSQL Summer site.  There will also be a talk by Alex Miller about the GPars Groovy concurrency library.

You can find future events on the schedule page.

It’s that time again – the Lambda Lounge meeting is this Thursday, May 6th at 6 pm, Appistry offices.  The speaker will be Jim Duey, a guest speaker coming in from Kansas City to talk about Clojure and logic programming.  Jim has done some excellent writing about Clojure and other interesting topics and I’m very much looking forward to meeting him and seeing what he’s put together.

Looking past this meeting, we have the next few months well booked as well:

• June –  Scott Bale talking about functions in Javascript and Aditya Siram talking about web apps with Haskell
• July – we’ll try to have a reprise of the cancelled January meeting with Alex Miller on the Groovy library GPars and Chris Newgent on Erlang Mnesia
• August – Tim Dalton will talk about monads in Scala and Darren Cruse will talk about NetKernel
• September – Michael Goldwasser from SLU will join us to talk about using Python as a first language at SLU

Hope to see you all Thursday!

I can’t believe it but the April meeting is this Thursday, April 1st already! We’ll have a trio of fun languages this month:

• Piet – Benjamin Lee will be showing us Piet, a crazy language embedded in Mondrian-style pictures.
• Ook – Bryan Venable will be showing us a bit of Ook, a language designed for orangutans.
• LOLCODE – Mario Aquino will be showing us the LOLCATS-inspired language. kthxbye.

The meeting is Thursday, April 1st 6pm at Appistry, as usual. I do NOT have a pizza sponsor yet for this month. If you know someone willing to sponsor, drop me a line.

Somehow it’s March and time for the next great Lambda Lounge meeting!

First up we’ll have James Carr (@jamescarr) talking about Behavior Driven Development with jspec:

Behavior Driven Development is a technique for improving collaboration and development by using examples of how a system or API works from the outside-in to drive it’s development. To illustrate, I’ll use the javascript based spec framework jspec to demonstrate how to build a javascript library one example at a time.

Following that, Ryan Senior will give us a run-down of emacs and when it will finally achieve sufficient intelligence to become SkyNet.

This meeting is sponsored by Object Computing (OCI). Thanks OCI!

The Lambda Lounge February meeting is just one week away! This month (Feb 4th), Matt Stine will be traveling to St. Louis to talk about Polyglot OSGi:

One of the greatest benefits of OSGi is its firewall-esque encapsulation of implementation details. The only traffic that gets in or out is the traffic that you explicitly specify, otherwise all bets are off. The aspiring polyglot can bring in the right tool for the right job by hiding it behind OSGi services as an “implementation detail,” provided that only Java language types are exported. The talk will look at the pros and cons of this approach, experiment with Groovy, Clojure, and Scala in an OSGI container, and also look at the “gotchas” involved along the way.

In other words, you can totally use OSGi to implement your own component in whatever cool language you want and throw it over the wall to those dopes next door using Java. Unless they do it to you first. Wait…maybe they already have!

As usual, the meeting starts at 6 pm at the Appistry office at 10845 Olive Blvd, Suite 260, St. Louis, MO 63141. This month’s meeting is sponsored by NetEffects. Thanks!

I wanted to put some info up here about the upcoming St. Louis Innovation Camp. Brian Blanchard contacted me about this last year and has been working hard at putting the pieces in place. This thing is gonna be awesome.

The idea is to bring together all kinds of people interested in startups – business, marketing, developers, whoever for a weekend focused on building new companies in St. Louis. The event will include a training series, an innovator’s cup for the best ideas, and workshops about how to take an idea and turn it into a company.

The St. Louis Innovation Camp will be held Feb. 26-28th at UMSL and the cost to attend is $50. If you’re interested in sponsoring, speaking, or helping out please drop an email to info@stlinnovationcamp.com. If you want to attend:

Register Now!!