Since I've (sadly) left Toronto, I've joined the Los Angeles Clojure Users Group. This is a great idea that I will suggest to the organizers (although we have no lack of presenters here).
I recently gave a talk concerning ClojureScript, and my style of presentation was "live-coding"; i.e. start from an empty project and build the software, and along the way show the audience each technique in action. It worked well, and people told me that this style is more engaging than the PowerPoint style.
With regards to the Toronto-Lisp github account, feel free to cease linking to it. It never served much of a purpose because no one ever cloned it and contributed to it as I had planned originally. It doesn't make much sense to have a monolithic repo for a user group, anyway. Much better to link to the individual members' Lisp projects, and encourage participation in them.
Vish
On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 12:10 PM, Rudolf omouse@gmail.com wrote:
I've found that user groups often fall into a pattern of lecture style presentations with slide shows. Since it's usually difficult to find presenters, often it ends up that after a while whoever founded the group speaks repeatedly. This leads to burn-out and isn't sustainable even if you're fortunate enough to have presenters who are skilled public speakers. It's also simply not a very good way to learn; your mind is a lot more involved in a when engaged in active discussion.
Interesting article, they're doing something called swarm coding where everyone ssh's into a machine and they pass control from one person to another using tmux or something else.
I know we sometimes share code listings or links to code at the meetups but it might be wise to do that before the meetups so that we can discuss things instead of playing catchup and asking for explanations.
I like reading Lisp code to try and improve my style and to learn more of the language and it's a breath of fresh air after dealing with Python/Django all day.
Also, instead of having that toronto-lisp github account perhaps we should just add links to people's repos onto the website. -Rudolf O.
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