Just realized I hadn't posted here in a while.  Two items to get caught up on.

I was recently invited to speak at the Rio de Janeiro "Dojo", which is apparently a regular meeting where people get together to practice modern programming techniques. I started with my "Smalltalk in an hour or so" presentation (same as the one I gave at OSCON last year), and then began the exercise. Although the group normally breaks up into small teams, we decided to do the FizzBuzz exercise as a group, letting me drive the keyboard and mouse.

To rehearse, I had done the exercise earlier in the day, so I had a sense of where the code was going, although the actual solution from the group effort was a bit different. We finished in about 45 minutes, and with the remaining time, we tackled the second stage (decimal values containing a 3 digit, not just numbers that are multiples of 3). After completing that, I showed that we could put the logic for #isFizz and #isBuzz over in the Integer class, which was pretty amazing unless you've seen it before, and even got the protocol category right so that the MCZ package contained the monkeypatches. Finally, I loaded the MCZ into a new image, and ran the tests. All green. It was a fun experience, and they later told me that they'd never even started the second stage question before with other languages, let alone getting it to a place where a file could easily be handed around with the solution (including tests).

And now, page 2.

I'm mostly in LA these days, so when I was checking out the Los Angeles Tech Events calendar, I spotted "LASTUG", which I further discovered meant that LA had its own Smalltalk Users Group!  Unfortunately for my Culver City proximity, the meetings are at Caltech in Pasadena... a bit of a drive. I attended last night's meeting, and gave a talk about my history with Smalltalk (all the way back to nudging Gemstone into being Smalltalk and not Smalltalk-like and playing with the Tektronix Magnolia), and about my experiences of leading the Dojo. Of course, there were also questions about FLOSS Weekly and Perl (especially comparing Perl to Smalltalk) as well. I'm definitely adding this group into my regular calendar scans.