Monday was the first Scala London User Group meeting that was held around a keyboard. Robert Rees arranged for a room, food, and drink at ThoughtWorks, Jamie Webb kindly gave an intro to Scala talk, and Aaron Roth provided print outs of a Scala for Java Programmers cheat sheet…and so we spent time working on the supermarket problem.
I counted 19 people (of which 3 were Brighton based), of mixed abilty (from functional people or Java people who had never touched Scala, all the way to expert Scala-heads), and we had working, unit tested, software by 10pm. Which—given that coding dojos sound a bit mad—is pretty good going.
Dojos are probably not going to be the way forward for this group, but I think it did a good job as an ice-breaker: an inclusive activity; a task that’s not daunting, that anyone can have a crack at. I definitely learnt stuff: testing using Specs, and need to understand the Scala patterns, such as Cake for dependency injection, and I have to stop putting off looking at Lift. Perhaps the most important thing for me was to learn that the Eclipse Scala plugin is going to be able to do mixed compilation of Java and Scala source in a project.
There was video of Jamies talk. I’ll add a link if it’s posted any place. At the moment there’s no web site for lsug but get in touch if you’d like the mailing list email address. See lsug.org for more details.
There are more photos on Flickr tagged with lsug.
