I think of our seasons here at NYC Smalltalk to run from September to June. July and August have proven to difficult to meet and we do take a break in December though sometimes our schedules get pushed so that we still end up presenting during the first week of December.
We had a great 2005 – 2006 season, we had everything from Sunit testing to a Ruby/Smalltalk presentation. We also met 9 times i.e. we had a full schedule and not once did I have to present We had good vendor support, and support from individuals like Carl Gundel that made the trip from Boston to present.
A rundown of this past season can checked out here:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ocit/blogView?searchCategory=community
This season should be as interesting. We have two new presenters right off the gates. Andres Valloud who will present on his experiences in winning the Smalltalk coding contest at Smalltalk Solutions 2006 and Mark Pirogovsky who will be presenting a demo of a engineering application written in Smalltalk. More details soon on those. We also may have an old friend to NYC Smalltalk come and visit us again, that being Eric Clayberg of Instantiations whom I cornered at Smalltalk Solutions this past April in Toronto. We have a decent number of VAST developers and customers that would like to hear the skinny on Instantiations effectively taking over the VAST line. Synchrony Systems also expressed interest in presenting. I also tried to recruit a known Squeaker, this guy lives in Boston so its do-able as Carl has proven but sure its a hike. He kind of said , “I’ll call you” and so I wait. Eric lives in Boston as well but he is a vendor so I have less pity. We shall see. Back to Squeak, I sort of feel bad that we under represent Squeak here. I welcome any Squeaker that wants to present to let me know.
Recently, an old Smalltaker friend of mine that had surely moved to the dark side dropped me a note remarking that it was good to see me still involved with Smalltalk and NYC Smalltalk. Well, I personally certainly have had my stints with Java but luckily really never stopped working with Smalltalk and I am happily fully employed in Smalltalk for a decent while. As far as the group well it has been around certainly since at least 94 and we have never stopped meeting. Sure some years were leaner than others but things are looking pretty good for Smalltalk from where I see it. VisualWorks for one is soooo much better, awesome really. The VW community is the most active I have ever seen it. Cincom is doing well. Squeakers are working on all sorts of nifty things.
What was particularly nice this past season was to see so many new faces to the group. Maybe this year we can get to see some of the old, old faces we have not seen in a while.
To keep abreast of our schedule folks can subscribe to our newsfeed. I will also post to comp.lang.smalltalk and to the VWNC list. Finally, we have a Yahoo group registering there also provides the advantage of having access to presentations that been made available to us by the presenters.
Here’s our newfeed:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/ocit-rss.xml
Joining our Yahoo groups happens here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nycsmalltalk/
Our next presentation is in September, date to be announced most probably the 13th and full details of Andres presentation will be made as soon as I can confirm the availability of the venue.
See you all soon.
-Charles