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Talk Description:
Have you wondered what the big fuss about message-passing is about?

This talk will be about message-passing concurrency, as a way to build flexible, reliable, and scalable applications. We'll go deeper than message-passing as just another way to program sequentially. We'll see how it requires a different way of thinking & design, that decouples the when-and-where of computation from the what-and-how.

In particular, we'll see a system in Ruby built on top of AMQP, a message queuing middleware. The system is still very alpha, but it's evolving fast along with a Real World application. Those of you familiar with Erlang will see many familiar ideas (e.g. actor & mailbox), but with interesting twists in operational characteristics.

Speaker: Howard Yeh
Howard Yeh is a growing hacker with interests in programming languages and scalability. He wants to create software that makes people happy.

Location Update
Just a note: The address for the meetup location was incorrect. Fixed it (s.h.).

Talk: Hacking parse.y
One of the darkest sides of Ruby is the parser. I tried to fix the notation or the syntax of ruby so as to understand the MRI implementation more deeply. This talk will introduce how input codes are parsed, and how to cook the parser. It would be better you fetch and build Ruby1.9.2dev in advance.

Speaker Bio:
Tatsuhiro UJIHISA is a Japanese programmer. He writes Ruby and Vim scripts, and also Haskell sometimes. He had worked as a part-time Rails programmer in Japan. He is interested in the Ruby language core and development environment software. These days he is coding rubyspec and blogger.vim, and is learning English.
http://ujihisa.blogspot.com/

Talk: Programming Erlang

A follow-up to last month's "Intro to Erlang", this talk will dive into the core components of the Erlang programming language, including processes, pattern matching, and message passing. Unlike the previous
talk, it will be light on hype and loaded with code samples.

If you missed the previous talk, you might want to run through the slides quickly at http://www.slideshare.net/kenpratt/intro-to-erlang before coming to get a brief overview Erlang.

Speaker Bio:
Ken Pratt has been developing software for the web for over 10 years. He fell in love with Ruby four years ago, but is still passionate about learning other languages and platforms. He has developed scalable web services for Electronic Arts, built Rails-based web applications since pre-1.0, and been featured in interactive art
installations.

We are incredibly lucky to have an amazing talk this month!

Talk: The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products

Speaker: Eric Ries

Talk Description:
Eric Ries is in town for Agile Vancouver, and he has agreed to do a "slightly-more-technical version of the lean startup talk, with plenty of time for Q&A and discussion." The talk he's referring to is his Lean Startup talk from the recent Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco. For a full description of that talk, see the page at O'Reilly's site.

Speaker Bio:
Eric Ries is the author of the blog Lessons Learned. He was the co-founder and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU, his third startup. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Smule, 750i and KaChing.

Talk Time: 7:00

Thanks very much to Owen Rogers from Agile Vancouver for setting this up!

Note: The "5 minutes & 5 slides" opening talk about Rubish has been postponed to next month so we don't waste time fiddling with projectors, etc.

For the February meetup, we're going to combine with Mobile Monday -- by which I mean that, once again, it's their event, they do all the work and we get to go and watch some good talks and discussions. There's even pizza and beer!

The site with the schedule is at:
http://www.momovan.com/events/2009/020209/020909.html

Their RSVP list is full. However, as far as I know, we did not need to RSVP (since it is free for us). (I could be totally wrong here though!) So, if you have not RSVP'd and you're a member of this meetup, you may be fine if you just show up at 6 PM. (None of us RSVP'd the last time we combined with their event...)

Sorry for the confusion; next time we do this I will get these details sorted out...