Learning Ruby The Fun Way
Posted on by ejames
CodeCom 2011 wrapped up today, and boy was it a ton of fun. Some comments after the event:
the workshop was fun ^_^ i brought home more than just a USB today, haha if only assignment is like this :P -Tong Hui KhiemThat was fun :D - sudonotplease
it’s not the size of the system, it’s how you use it! #CodeCom - @joshuatj
We started at about 11, and spent the first bit of the event listening to talks. I gave a short introduction to NUS Hackers (which would be posted to this blog later this week), and then Jason Ong of the Singapore Ruby Brigade did a talk titled Why Ruby.
The two big winners of the day were Adrian Cheng and Yi Hui of SMU, who brought home a 1.5TB hard disc drive and 19’ LCD monitor respectively (Adrian, in particular, was ahead for pretty much all of the tournament). But there was a general feel of camaraderie in both rounds of competition, as Chris Boesch, our tournament manager, spent about 20 minutes laying the ground rules for the event. (“If you whine about your computer being slower, don’t play! We’re here to learn and have fun, okay!?”)
And have fun we did. I took a stab at some of the problems later on in the day, and found that they were structured to quickly teach Ruby syntax. To wit: I found myself stuck on a couple of problems, found out that Ruby delimited blocks with an end, and must say that (with Div taunting me after the fact) I won’t forget that for quite a bit.
Lunch was great. We ordered pizza, sponsored by IDA and Garag3, and most of us gathered around to talk geek and share on what we’ve learnt. Some coreteam members brought their iPads to code on; one participant had a laptop open, programming a Project Euler problem that he teased us into thinking about.
All in all - a great day.
