Software developer's group
Yesterday I did something a little different: I attended a meet-up for software developers. It was sort of like a furry meet-up in that most of the people present were of the feline persuasion and very few of them said anything. Basically, a few people played "exhibitionist" and showed off their naughty bits software code to the people playing "voyeur".
One guy showed off his Haskell program for XMPP messaging on multiple platforms, to get around Google's new (evil?) restrictions on IM chats. I've never used Haskell, but it does seem to do a reasonable job on such multithreaded tasks.
Another guy showed off his shell script for grabbing videos from YouTube and queueing them for background downloading to his laptop. He said that his mother once complained about YouTube's new advertisements and he hadn't even noticed them because he never actually views videos at their website! His T-shirt was too short and he displayed some bellyfur whenever he gesticulated (which was often).
A third guy showed off a chat robot he uses to keep his programming team on the same page. It contained various silly features and inside jokes. I asked him why his company was hosting these meetings and providing free pizza and pop, but he couldn't really explain that and just mumbled something about "exposure".
After the main meeting, I whipped out my laptop and showed off some code from Company 𝔾's website. I mentioned that I had processed the data using Lex "because I'm just that old", but the shell-script guy said he also uses Lex, even though he's probably 15 years younger than I am. I mentioned that I was looking for a new job, because seven years with Company 𝔾 is just too much (the average programmer changes jobs every two years). One fellow who works at OpenText said that his company was hiring. I suppose I could do that job, but it's full time and I was hoping for a semi-retired position. And there's some Windoze programming required. And they've outsourced their HR department; I was hoping to avoid the cattle calls by schmoozing at a programmer's meeting instead of spamming my résumé all over the Internet.
Dunno yet whether I'll go to next month's meeting. I certainly have plenty of code I could show off, but... what exactly is the point of these meetings???
One guy showed off his Haskell program for XMPP messaging on multiple platforms, to get around Google's new (evil?) restrictions on IM chats. I've never used Haskell, but it does seem to do a reasonable job on such multithreaded tasks.
Another guy showed off his shell script for grabbing videos from YouTube and queueing them for background downloading to his laptop. He said that his mother once complained about YouTube's new advertisements and he hadn't even noticed them because he never actually views videos at their website! His T-shirt was too short and he displayed some bellyfur whenever he gesticulated (which was often).
A third guy showed off a chat robot he uses to keep his programming team on the same page. It contained various silly features and inside jokes. I asked him why his company was hosting these meetings and providing free pizza and pop, but he couldn't really explain that and just mumbled something about "exposure".
After the main meeting, I whipped out my laptop and showed off some code from Company 𝔾's website. I mentioned that I had processed the data using Lex "because I'm just that old", but the shell-script guy said he also uses Lex, even though he's probably 15 years younger than I am. I mentioned that I was looking for a new job, because seven years with Company 𝔾 is just too much (the average programmer changes jobs every two years). One fellow who works at OpenText said that his company was hiring. I suppose I could do that job, but it's full time and I was hoping for a semi-retired position. And there's some Windoze programming required. And they've outsourced their HR department; I was hoping to avoid the cattle calls by schmoozing at a programmer's meeting instead of spamming my résumé all over the Internet.
Dunno yet whether I'll go to next month's meeting. I certainly have plenty of code I could show off, but... what exactly is the point of these meetings???