October 2012 – Minisculus

An Enigma Rotor Courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org

Date: Thursday 25th October 2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Minisculus Challenge

The Minisculus Challenge is a web based programming challenge originally written for the Software Craftsmanship 2010 meetup. This is great fun and pretty addictive.

I won’t write too much about it as all the info is at the site linked above. In short you need to program JSON restful requests against a web based service to obtain questions and submit results. It is language agnostic so bring along your laptops and favoured envronment. We will organise the structure of the challenge on the evening.

Alien Invasion

Some time back, Paul Williams ran a session where we programmed against a web API. The code for the project was originally written as a test bed for a tool called NCrunch. The upshot of this is that the client section of the software is a .net dll. A number of session attendees raised the point that the .net dependency was a pain and it would be better to be language agnostic. In our ideas session we have listed “lets do a project together” – well here is an idea. We can refactor the alien invasion code to be all server side and maybe restful.

Paul Williams has offered to put together a few slides. We can then discuss the project, with a view to development practices, infrastructure and so on. Bring your ideas.

See you there

Neil