This is the website for the Western Massachusetts Developers' Group. We meet up twice every month (every other Thursday). Our meetings are pretty casual, if you're involved in any kind of development and are in our area, stop by our next meeting and join our e-mail list, we also have a Facebook group. You might also catch us on IRC (niven.freenode.net) in the #wmassdevs channel.
We have a meeting this Thursday (May 15th)! We’ll be meeting up at Panera Bread over in Hadley, towards the back of the restaurant. You’ll notice us as the clump of people desperately trying to position tables in order to maximize the people-chair-table interface surface area.
We’ll also be taking a look at any text-adventure games that people put together. They don’t have to be finished or even working (although that would be neat); we are interested in whatever you have on disk.
We have a more than a week and a half before our next meeting and I wanted to reiterate Michael’s challenge to the group to hack a little text adventure together. His original post talked about implementing a toy game in Python but it would be just as interesting to see these coded up in any dynamic or vaguely esoteric language. That’s right any dynamic or esoteric language.
I’ve been working on mine in my spare time and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a really helpful way to get some exercise in a new language; it’s a lot more interesting than the logging and testing framework I was working on. 
At our next meeting we could take a look at some source code and talk about it a little bit. It would be an interesting way to get a taste of what some of the other dynamic languages are like, all of the sudden there are a lot of them to choose from. Being able to see the different ways the different languages enable developers to solve the same set of problems is what interests me the most.
Code would be due the day before our next meeting, May 15th, and could be submitted to the list. Everyone would bring a couple copies of their source code to pass around the group. If enough people are interested and feel the time constraint is too tight, I’d be excited to push it up a meeting to get more people involved.
What is this challenge?
The challenge is to build a very basic text adventure game using the dynamic language of your choice. As much as you can, you should stick to standard libraries (i.e., don’t pull in a text adventure building library). At bare minimum, the game should…
Here’s a link to a sample implementation. It doesn’t do much but gives you an idea of the sort of scope we’re looking for. We’re not talking about “Zork”. 
And, of course, there’s no stress on story. Three rooms and a box is just fine.
Let us know you are interested!
If you are interested in taking part, e-mail the list and let us know what language you think you might target. Certainly you can change your mind at any time, I’m hoping that as people join in it’ll keep everyone’s energy up.
Submitting code
Once you have some code together, you can get it to the group a couple of ways.
I’m looking forward to seeing what you hack together! 
We are meeting up this week at Panera Bread in Hadley at 7:00pm. We’ll be toward the back where we can get hold of more tables and chairs.
We’ll also be taking a look at the beginnings of some of the text-adventure game implementations. 
I should have mentioned this earlier but it had slipped my mind: Rich Hickey’s presentation at our March 20th meeting is now available online!
The slides and sample code are also available, as well as the audio.
Our next meeting is this week, Thursday April 17th. We’ll be meeting up at Panera Bread in Hadley at 7:00pm. We’ll be toward the back of the restaurant, there tend to be more free tables back there.
See you there!
That’s right, our next meeting is this Thursday, April 3rd, at Panera Bread in Hadley. Join us for some coffee, sandwiches and some tech chatter
No one is likely to forget, but I wanted to post reminding everyone that this Thursday is Clojure Day. Lou has managed to get Rick Hickey to speak to the group and Chas is providing a larger space. We’ll be meeting over at Potpourri Plaza (243 King Street in Northampton) and this meeting will start at 6:30pm.
If you haven’t played around with Clojure, you should definitely check it out.
We look forward to seeing you there!
We’re meeting again this Thursday, March 6. We’ll be gathering over at Panera Bread in Hadley, we meet towards the back. We’ll be working for a more sane table and chair setup this week as well, the spiral was a novel idea but I suspect the best is yet to come.
See you there!
On March 20th, the regular meeting of the Western Mass Developer’s Group will feature Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure.
Clojure is a dialect of Lisp that compiles to Java Bytecode and runs on the JVM. It features persistent, immutable data structures and a model for creating multi-threaded designs. If you haven’t seen clojure, please take a look at the site:
The meeting will be at 243 King Street in Northampton — Chas has arranged a space, and there is a lot of parking. The presentation will start at 6:30.
And, if you have a chance, you might want to check out his talk at the Lisp NYC meeting:
We’re having a meeting tonight, we had to skip last week on account of Valentine’s Day. Our schedule has changed as well, our next meeting will be two weeks from this one.
Join us at Panera Bread tonight at 7:00pm for some tech chat and food.
