Show and Tell 23

James and I were joined by Riccardo and Ben G for our 23rd Show and Tell. Held at the The Wood Street Bar and Restaurant on Wed 10th August.

Companies and cooperatives

We spent some time talking about companies and company structures.

It was interesting to hear about Riccardo and Alex’s company. Their current structure sounds a little similar to the first version of GFR in that they have a group of contractors working together under a single company name. One notable difference is that they’ve recently taken on their first employee.

Their employee requires a visa to work in the UK and Riccardo explained a bit about obtaining this through the UKVI. The process didn’t sound too onerous or expensive and having done it once should mean that it’s much less painful if they decide to go through it again.

Jupyter/IRuby

James showed us the Jupyter Notebook and IRuby kernel running on his machine (try it yourself at try.jupyter.org). I haven’t seen Jupyter in action before and was really impressed by the mix of documentation, executable code and its output. I’m sure I’ve written blog posts/gists in the past that would’ve been made much easier if I’d been able to use something like this.

Time tracking app

Riccardo spoke about Electron and how he’s been experimenting with it, along with ClojureScript, by building a time tracking app. I didn’t know anything about Electron and was surprised to learn that it’s what powers the Atom editor; as well as a number of other well known apps.

Inform 7

Ben showed us Inform 7 and an interactive fiction game he’s been writing with his son. I was somewhat amazed at the natural language used to write these games. You can see an example by viewing the source of When in Rome 2.

I’ve just taken a break from writing these notes and spent about 10 minutes playing When in Rome 2 using Zoom. I didn’t really know what I was doing, or how the game worked, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Swift & Swift Playground

Ben also showed us Interactive Playgrounds in Xcode. I believe these are supposed to give you rapid feedback while prototyping code. In reality, it sounds as though the time taken to compile the code before displaying the result can make it a somewhat frustrating experience.

Show and Tell 24

Please get in touch if you’re interested in joining us for the next Show and Tell on Wednesday 14th September.

– Chris