And on we go to the next monthly meeting which is on January the 18th at 7pm. We’ll try the usual venue of The George Inn, 77 Borough High Street. SE1 1NH.

Please make sure that you’re subscribed the proper calendar. I think the update of MobileMe Calendar killed the old link. So, you can subscribe to the calendar using this link. I think the alarms are pushed as well, so don’t be surprised if you get a reminder 3 days before.

You can also keep up to date by following the NSCoder Night Category.

If it’s your first time, contact me about getting my mobile number so you can find us if it isn’t obvious where/who we are. Or, DM the Twitter account.

See you in a couple of weeks.

The December meeting is on the 14th (second Tuesday) rather than the 21st (third tuesday). This will be at the usual place, although we may have to move if it gets too crowded. If you don’t already have my phone number this would be a good time to ask me for it. I’d like to be able to put it up publicly, but there are too many idiots in the world.

I went to my first London Python Dojo last night and had a better time than I expected. I know a little Python (just enough to hurt myself). I was intrigued by this event where the idea was to learn together rather than just share knowledge.

The evening started off with beer and pizza, thanks to our hosts Fry-IT, and then moved on to two short presentations. The first was on FluidDb and the second was something to do with creating Python packages. Yes, both were over my head.

After that there was a short discussion about a problem to attempt. A blackjack game was suggested and we split into 5 groups of four and had a little under an hour to solve this. I didn’t have much confidence that we could do it. One person sat at a laptop, we spent about 5 minutes deciding on the approach to use and then the typing started.

I wouldn’t have been able to write the code as quickly as it was being knocked out, but I could understand it. And although we were all talking there were no arguments and we pushed through and got a working program done (with one easily fixed bug) just in time. Although not strictly pair programming, I can see why that approach can generate quality code quickly.

But that wasn’t it. Each team demoed their solution and showed their code. This was just as useful as writing the program in the first place. Because we had all been thinking about the same problem it was easy to understand the different approaches that were presented. There were class based solutions as well as functional ones (some had tests!) and we even saw the major development environments – Macs running vi, Linux machines with Emacs, and Notepad++ on Windows. We also saw a solution using Python3.

I enjoyed this more than I expected. It was nice to be able to contribute even though I’m not that experienced with Python, and I learned plenty just by watching and asking questions. It was a welcoming bunch and I will certainly be going again. And this time I’ll pay more attention to people’s names.

I don’t think anybody used version control, though…

After spending the evening in the Old Bar which was mostly empty we thought we’d try and have the next meeting there as well. Far more space and quiet enough to hear everybody. This could have been because people had gone elsewhere to watch the football or were sitting on the benches outside to enjoy the clement weather. The downside was that the food wasn’t as good.

So, for next month, we’ll try and have the meeting at the George Inn and see how it copes with a larger group of people, and for those who turn up early they can go to the Bunch of Grapes for food. There is no point in trying to arrange dinner afterwards because people have got trains to catch.

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The other idea I had was to gather on the embankment outside the London Assembly building. But the weather reports say it might be windy.

This is just a temporary location for a week.

Tomorrow is the third Tuesday of the month, and that means another London Mac developer get together.

See you there.

The meeting is at the usual place at the usual time. There is a table booked upstairs from 7pm. Send me an email or a DM on twitter if you need my phone number or any other details.

As it’s such a nice day, I might turn up early. See you later.

WiFi can be spotty in the pub, so if you want to be sure to find us drop me a message and I’ll let you have my mobile number. There is food available until 9pm if you’re likely to be hungry. Unfortunately, there is a minimum age of 21.

As usual, you don’t have to bring a laptop and code; you can just come and be social.

Finally, at one of last year’s meetings, mention was made of having a Cocoa hackday along the lines of CocoaDevHouse. If you have any ideas for this or have experience in setting up these kinds of events I’d love to talk to you about taking this further.

See you tomorrow.

The London chapter of NSCoder night closed the year in style. More developers than ever attended travelling in to London from as far as Brighton, Cambridge, Reading and Colchester. A very crowded and noisy pub meant that it was more of a social occasion with laptops being brought out only now and again. The picture was taken early on so it doesn’t look that croweded, but we ended up taking over the whole corner. The numbers were also swelled by combining it with the London CocoaHeads group this month.

Thank you to everyone for coming out and making these monthly gatherings a success. We’ll start again in January, just as the wind up to NSConference starts. Keep an eye on the feed and the calendar for up to date information.

Seasons greetings to you all!

There may be some books brought along so people can look through them if they are considering buying them.: Coders At Work, Cocoa Design Patterns, Core Data, Xcode3 book, Head First Design Patterns, Head First Javascript. Please let me know if your interested in any of these; I don’t mind bringing them along, but not just for the sake of it. Particularly the Head First books, which have a unique approach which looks strange to a lot of people, so they are worth a look.