Announcing: A meetup for Honolulu-based dynamic programming language enthusiasts

Dynamic language features, concepts, and implementations in multiple languages will be presented in talks and workshops. All languages are welcome, but this group will initially focus on: Objective-C, Haskell, Python, Clojure, Ruby and Javascript.

All participants are encouraged to present some material. Topics will be covered in talks and workshops by the members of this group. Subjects will come from a cohesive set of dynamic language concepts.

This series of talks aims to bring discussion and learning of interesting programming topics to Honolulu, not by importing speakers or exporting programmers (to/from the mainland), but by harnessing and growing our own talents locally. Think of it a first-rate programming conference, happening in slow motion, spread out across several months.

Some manner of pastry will be served.

Please sign up on our meetup page to get involved: http://www.meetup.com/dynamic

Talk #1: Objective-C - What makes it dynamic? Tuesday - May 1, 2012 - 7pm by Kyle Oba

Talk #2: Haskell - An introduction Thursday - May 24, 2012 - 7pm by Tim Newsham

These talks both take place at The Box Jelly 307c Kamani Street, inside Fishcake

Further planned talks: - Functional Python - By Shu Zong Chen - Clojure - An intro, setup w/ Emacs, Slime, Leiningen - by Kyle

Please forward to anyone you think might be interested.

Thank you, Kyle

Detailed descriptions of upcoming talks:

Talk #1: - by Kyle Oba Dynamic Languages - They’re not just for Rubyists (and Pythonistas)… Being the platform language for iOS development, Objective-C has recently exploded in popularity (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Objective-C.html). One reason it makes developers so productive is that it supports many dynamic programming concepts.

This talk will highlight the Objective-C runtime, and how it implements some of the language’s interesting and useful features (message passing, key-value-observing, categories, etc).

Talk #2: - by Tim Newsham The Haskell programming language is unique, challenging and inspiring. Haskell is notable for its strong, static type system, its “lazy” evaluation and its adherence to strict functional purity. Programming in Haskell is very different from programming in C- and Lisp-like languages most programmers are familiar with. Simply learning Haskell can be a mind-expanding experience.

In this talk we will get a glimpse of Haskell, discuss what makes it unique and compare its features with those in other languages.

Presentation: Emil will be speaking about a brief history/introduction of 3D printing technology and how it has gone from industrial to hobby use, its future, how to use it and how it can affect what you do.

About the speaker: Emil Reyes is the owner of RAPID Technology and has been involved with the 3D Printing/RAPID prototyping industry since the late 90s.

When: March 21st, 6:30pm

Where: The Box Jelly (current location of the HI Capacity Makerspace). Address: 307c Kamani St Honolulu, HI 96813 Look for the “The Box Jelly” sign (or the Fishcake sign). Street parking is available and there is also parking at Sports Authority (owned by the same land owner).

Please RSVP on EventBrite: http://hicap-3d-overview.eventbrite.com/

Over the past 2 months, HICapacity.org has gone through a major overhaul on the front-end and back-end. We want to take a moment to expose our architecture for the site, examine our choices, and talk about the future of the site.

Why Jekyll?

Take a look at the content on most sites. What actually warrants a backend database? Typically things such as logins, remote private API access, etc do. It turns out that, these services can sometimes be off-loaded to a web service with the proper security measures. Most of the time for a news-centric site, like ours, all we need is a static site generator. Jekyll is perfect for the job. You write all your posts by cloning a Git repository. You can save the server a lot of resources by using flat files generated from Jekyll. If you need plugins like Facebook, you can still add them to your site by calling their APIs through client side Javascript.

Read about Jekyll here - https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

Presentation by Julie

Take time out of your day to come to Julie’s presentation about Jekyll on Thursday, February 9, 2012 - 7 PM at the makerspace.