Yesterday afternoon, I dragged myself out of my post-Dim Sum
reptilian stupor and drove down to Stanford. After trekking
about for a while (I had printed out several maps, none of
which were particularly useful in finding the room. :-/), I
arrived at the hack session.
The facilities are great: a largish room with chairs, tables,
power connections, white boards, and wifi. There was even a
snack dispenser out in the hall! Although I didn't see anyone
take advantage of this, there were some pleasant, shady spots
outside for back-to-nature hacking.
After some short introductions (who am I; what's my project?),
we all settled down to hacking or quiet conversations. In my
case, I chatted with Jonathan Dugan for a while about common
interests (AI, graph-based data structures), then settled in
to start translating a Perl script into Ruby.
Although I asked for (and received) help at a couple of points,
there were many more times when I solved problems on my own. I
was helped, nonetheless, by the knowledge of a support network
sitting around me in the room.
As I commented to Jonathan, it reminded me of some of the times
I spent in the SF State Computer Lab, back in 1970. Email lists
and chat sessions are fine, but they don't have the convenience
and immediacy of a room full of hackers!
Anyway, if you're free on the 4th Sunday of October, grab your
laptop and wander on down. In fact, if anyone is interested in
a "Second Sunday Scripting Session" up in (say) SF, let me know!
-r
--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume rdm
cfcl.com
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Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development
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