Backed up from a local Blogger export (114123278608416149/114123278608416149.html) on 2026-01-01.

I showed up at the Seattle.rb meeting the other night. There was a lot of interesting talk going around. The web stuff (rails) was interesting but not because I’m into web stuff (I’m not) but because of the build environment and testing setup that one of the Seattle.rb guys Eric Hodel had running on his laptop. The main thing I got out of this is how neat Rake is which I think I will use for building my C++ projects. Also he had integrated the idea of continuous integration into his environment so that this tool ‘autotest’ would stat his source files and automatically run tests on it when it changed. It also had the ability to automatically generate test methods for his code which was neat. This was an idea that comes from the squeak environment.

There were some other interesting people there that I didn’t get to spend much time talking with like Geoffrey Grosenbach.

Later on there was some interesting talk from people involved in ruby VM improvement and language design.

Anyways, a lot more community activity than I had envisioned!