Initial fireside chat - RISC OS Community

The fireside chat is for anyone interested in coding on RISC OS; one of the topics will be organizing beginner-to-expert sessions.

The informal zoom meeting is on Saturday, 26th November, at 7:30 pm.

ROUGOL is hosting the event, and you can DM me on ChatCube, Twitter or Toot, or email here, bottom the page, for the Zoom meeting details.

Come and join in.

That sounds good Andrew, please count me in. There’s an article on using Zoom in Drag N Drop coming out this week, I’ve learned a fair bit about presenting over Zoom with RISC OS, happy to assist where I can.

Chris.

Thank you, Chris; it is good to hear about the upcoming drag-n-drop article on Zoom. I’m also looking forward to the meet-up and hearing about your experience.

Some news to share, Bryan from ROUGOL has offered to host the meeting. :)

I’ve updated the original post above to say that the informal zoom meeting is taking place on Saturday, 26th November, at 7:30 pm and given several options for contacting me.

I should add that I had a peek at Paolo’s Git repository link, and it’s useful; there’s structure and helpful information, such as the “Coding on RISC OS” and “RISC OS Community” sections.

Fingers crossed, ChatCube works as Twitter’s not as straightforward as it should be; you’ll need to follow me, then DM or send a tweet to the pinned thread if that fails.

EDIT: ChatCube worked as expected, +1 Cloverleaf. :)

I’d like to sit on on this, but I can’t work out how to contact you for a link. Help please.

No problem, we have a solution here. There is a link at the bottom of the page provided by our friend at the site, who also has the details of the Zoom call.

The fire chat is tomorrow. See you there if you’re free; for the Zoom call details and how to get them, see the first post above.

Thanks everyone who attended and thanks a lot for the incredible feedback everyone!

I have updated the project repository with tonight firechat ideas, commits and the target date for the first meeting with the details here: https://github.com/RISC-OS-Community/CodingOnRISC-OS

Cheers!

I completely forgot about this :(

Did anyone record it?

I remembered, but was very tired and feeling a bit spaced. So better to Netflix and chill ¹ rather than turn up for something where a functioning brain would be expected.

¹ As in actual Netflix, not the usual euphemism.

Looks like a fair amount of ground was covered. https://github.com/RISC-OS-Community/CodingOnRISC-OS/commit/52b51f9bd5a5b2b3dca70382cb080bf9cbec1ca3

Thank you to everyone who made it; it was an excellent initial event.

We did cover a lot, and I hope everyone found it beneficial; I am interested in feedback. Feel free to get in touch.

Step 1. Grab the Code; there’s a spotlight meeting scheduled for the 21st of January, 2023. Several people volunteered to present how they use Git for RISC OS using different platforms, including cross-compilation and a !SimpleGit demo—followed by a Q&A.

Thank you, join in.

Rick: Yes, much ground was covered in the 4 hours; sad you couldn’t make it. I will have a chilled day today; we all deserve it. Hope to see you next time.

“Introduction to Simon’s Wilson C kernel?” Who? :)

Or do you think it’s a basketball I talk to?

Andrew: There’s a very short introduction to getting the RISC OS code using sgit on RISC OS here: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/17499

@ Simon,
sorry I had some family issue and still haven’t managed to email you asking if you would like to give a technical presentation of your C Kernel.

I guess you comment count as a yes :)

@ Chris Mahoney

Did anyone record it?

No, this was a fireside chat and some people mentioned they would feel unconfortable if we were recording.

However, presentations and mini courses have to be recorded, the whole point is to share knowledge (so they will be recorded).

If you have any idea, proposal, fix please feel free to add it to the project repository (or also let me know here or via email).

The first meeting is about to make the use of git easy for everyone and showing how to use it on various platforms and for RISC OS usage. So, hopefully, that should help making git based interactions easier for everyone.

We did cover a lot, and I hope everyone found it beneficial;

Even as a non-programmer, I found the whole event most interesting. It was refreshing to see and hear people talking about the art of the possible rather than dreaming of the impossible!

I am interested in feedback. Feel free to get in touch.

Is this forum the only way to get in touch? I’d rather not let everyone and his dog find out just how much I don’t know about programming.

@ John

Is this forum the only way to get in touch? I’d rather not let everyone and his dog find out just how much I don’t know about programming.

No, you can also email us (to email me you can use this link https://paolozaino.wordpress.com/contact/) works also on NetSurf (and obviously Iris, Otter browser etc.) for the die hard RISC OS users who only use RISC OS. Email should be private enough I think.

…to email me you can use this link…

Thanks Paolo.

turn up for something where a functioning brain would be expected.

Rick, I joined the chat without a functioning brain. I just listened in, there was no pressure to have to say anything!

I’d rather not let everyone and his dog find out just how much I don’t know about programming.

We’ve all been there. We all started from zero. Anyone who genuinely wants to learn, and is prepared to put in plenty of effort, will get help and support from the programmers among us. I’m sure of that.

I would make an important point about attitude. Even now, there are bits of code that take me many attempts to get right, so don’t give up – keep trying sensible alternatives, and ask for help.

^ This.

‘just listened in’
Is that literal – ie only sound output?

Some Rick “wisdom”:

You need to invest in a big yellow rubber duck.

So you have some perplexing code that doesn’t want to work. Simply grab Howard (or whatever you choose to call your duck), perch him near to you, then explain to him in detail what the code is doing.

You see, the act of programming is thinking about programs as a programmer, but sometimes one can miss painfully obvious problems because we’re thinking more in terms of code than logic.
So step back, explain to your duck, and maybe you’ll be like “oh, hang on, that’s not quite right” because in doing the explanation you shift from looking at code to looking at logic and flow.

Also, don’t be afraid if something just feels wrong about a function (whether or not it works) to tear it out and rewrite it. Sometimes your second attempt will be far better.

But on the contrary, be aware that if you just throw together some crap that works to go back later and redo it, said crap will be present in released software because there will be so many other things to do that you’ll never go back unless there’s an actual bug that needs fixed.

And don’t be afraid of paranoid validation of inputs. Okay, so that’s a string pointer and a length and the length can never be zero (or negative). Check it anyway, lest a bug elsewhere causes the function to blow up. Ditto a file handle in a function that will only ever be called with a valid file handle. Check it isn’t null anyway. A few cycles wasted on seemingly pointless input validation could save pain in the future.

Don’t be afraid to comment. Back in the day of BASIC it was normal to use single or double letter variable names and no comments as these things take space and time (even today, a bunch of REMs can impact execution speed). But comments in BASIC can be stripped, and they don’t count at all in C or assembler.
Trust me, when you come back to a project after five years with no recollection of how it works, those comments will be invaluable.
If something is done in a potentially unusual or unexpected way, it is important to document the way that was not used, and why. This can save much time later for anybody thinking “why doesn’t it do…?”.

But most of all, coding should be fun (unless you’re getting well paid for it). So if something is annoying and ducky can’t help, go brew a cuppa, take a walk.
Or my personal favourite, sit out in the rain and try to listen for the patterns in the rain drops (yes, they’re there, but it’s like the audio version of those cross eyed 3D messages from random looking dots). Just don’t think about coding at all. If it becomes annoying or horrible, then it’s not fun, and you’ll come to dislike it. Trust me, there’s a reason I write programs for myself and not as a keyboard monkey.

Anyway, talk to the duck, comment lots, validate inputs, try again, and don’t be afraid to walk away and do something else for a while.