From: Pat Eyler <pate@...>
Date: 2002-08-14T09:10:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Texas codefest: Suggestions welcome



On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Hal E. Fulton wrote:

> Well, the little get-together we talked about
> is happening in a matter of days now (Aug 16-18).
> 
> A small handful of people will meet in Austin
> Texas for the purpose of churning out some
> Ruby code -- hopefully useful stuff.
> 
> The idea is to contribute something non-trivial
> to the community that a small group can do (or
> make a good start on) in relatively few man-hours.
> 
> As we haven't finalized what we'll work on, we're
> still open to any suggestions.


Just a few thoughts from Ruby in the Rainforest  before I weigh in:

  make a decision pretty soon.
  let everyone know what the plans are (and the goals)
  have story cards (or whatever) ready before the event
  make sure at least two people (not travelling together) are ready to
   steer the whole thing
  you might want to make sure everyone can check out any existing
   code/tests/docs/whatever before the leave for the event.

> 
> So please: Bring them on.
> 
> Below is a quote from David Black's last email to
> the group on the subject.
> 
> Cheers,
> Hal
> 
> > I've been scouring CPAN looking for ideas for things that we might
> > focus on that Ruby (I think) doesn't have.  Note that CPAN is just a
> > source of ideas; anything we write in Ruby does not have to duplicate
> > a CPAN module.
> > 
> > Here's my little list of ideas:
> > 
> >   getopt with hash
> >   something PDF or RTF related
> >   PayPal module (Hal's idea -- there's at least one similar
> >                  thing on CPAN :-)
> >   Parse-RecDescent (too ambitious, but would be great)
> >   text wrapping and formatting stuff:
> >     Text::Autoformat (smart formatting, URLs etc.)
> >     Text::Format
> >   Text::ParseWords
> >   CamelCase cleanser (would cause grumbling :-)
> >   scanf (is this superseded by scan, etc.?)
> >   expand (tabs)
> >   playing card utility modules
> >   RAA views (by age, by author, etc.)
> >     (I know this might be obsoleted soon, but still it might
> >      be easy enough to do quickly)

   maybe you should talk to Sean Chittenden (seanoc on irc) about doing
   this with/for Rubynet

other ideas:
   MARC::Record
   NET::Z3950 (see perl.z3950.org and www.indexdata.dk/yaz for more info)
   
or applications (or enhancements to them):
   blogger (and a client)
   test coverage checker
   doc coverage checker
   a ruby shell for regular command line use (okay, so this is way too
      much to get done ... but I've gotta keep plugging it.)

-pate


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