Norwich Ruby User Groups fascination with fighting Badgers and Foxes continued this meet up. The blood sport took place at Furthers offices on the evening of the 17th of December. Paul started us off with brief heads up on continuous integration and very kindly distributed copies of a his continuous integration 101 booklet. Some discussion ensued and questions were batted back and forth. People had evolved different integration solutions to meet their particular problems and languages.
We divided into two groups and started on improving the NRUG Battle Critter™ battleships game. Integrating our code to the NRUG server as we coded and asked Matthew random questions. As usual abilities and familiarity with the technologies varied widely but much laughter was had by all. Coding was powered and aided by home made mince pies and mulled cider provided by everyones favourite Ruby couple the Bennett-Loveseys.
Solutions were honed and iterated over the evening with some team members engaged in light espionage.
Those of us whose work confines them to writing word documents were happy as Larry when given a coding task.
We ended with a battle best of three to test who had created the best algorithm. Blue team won the battle but as a Red team member I felt our excuses edged it on the night. Marc was particularly inventive when faced with possible defeat.
As usual much knowledge was shared amongst the group. Phil perhaps winning the prize for most condensed one liner. Questions were asked and answered and Chris revealed how he fits all that information in his brain. Everyone walked away with a Virtual Machine of the game to be fettled at our leisure. You can access the battle critters code at https://github.com/ArchaicDamsel/nrug-battlecritters
Next meet up planned to be a show and tell at a time to be announced. I’d encourage anyone interested in Ruby at any level or contemplating using it more to come along to this very friendly and open group.
Plus I found how to fix my weird display issues in virtual box, a new yiddish word, Apple should put their laptops together better, Southwold has got fibre and how do you actually get to MMK without teleporting.
This article was originally written for Norfolk Tech Journal.
