This exercise may optionally be used to replace the mark of an earlier exercise. That is, I will take the best 10 of your 11 exercises and calculate your final grade based on that.
Step 1: go to a meetup
For this “exercise”, you should attend a local Meetup on a programming language-related topic. Any topic relevant to the material in this course is acceptable. You can also attend a similar get-together that isn't under the meetup.com banner.
Some meetups that look relevant to me (but not the only ones you can attend):
- PolyglotVancouver
- Haskell UnMeetup
- Clojure Meetup
- Lisp Aliens
- Erlang Meetup
- Scala Meetup
- Smalltalk Meetup
- VanJS: Vancouver Javascript Developers
- R Users Group
- Ruby/Rails Meetup
- Python User Group
The point here is to see how some of these languages (that you might not have thought of as “practical”) are actually used, and meet some fo the people that use them. If you make some interesting contacts and that leads to a job, that's okay too.
Don't worry if you don't understand everything at the meetup: some of them can be very technical. You can see how these technologies are used without getting every detail.
Step 2: tell me about it
Write a short report summarizing the meetup you attended.
We aren't looking for a lot here: just prove to us that you actually went and paid attention. If it's more than a page, you've spent to long on the report. The point is to go, not write a long report.
Submit your work for this exercise in CourSys.