I spent yesterday evening at the latest Tunbridge Wells developers meetup and as well as providing some some links from the talk I gave I thought I'd write up a little about the meetup.

The event was held in the upstairs room of Sankey's in Tunbridge Wells and had a slightly smaller than normal turnout with nine people making along. This meant the talks were very interactive and allowed for some excellent whole group discussions afterwards.

There were two talks given during the evening:

• Ahmed introduced us to a project he's been working on "Snowball" which he's hoping will be open sourced in the next week or so. (I think) a Snowball is a way of describing and encapsulating a javascript project skeleton along with tools for managing and auto-updating dependencies. It also includes an MVC abstraction layer that currently maps closely to AngularJS.

• I gave a (very) short introduction to using Vagrant to build reproducible and shareable Linux and/or Windows development environments. Here are links to the various software and sources I mentioned:

  • Vagrant
  • VirtualBox
  • Ubuntu package search
  • Modern.IE - official VM disk images for testing IE versions
  • IE VMs - Bash script to automatically download and configure the Modern.IE VM images in VirtualBox on Linux
  • Vagrant Boxes built from the Modern.IE images
  • A "cut down" Vagrant Windows box - only 3GB!
  • Chocolatey Windows package manager

  Just for interest - please don't use these(!) - my two (overly simple) provisioning scripts were:

  # Bash used to provision with Linux
  export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
  apt-get install --yes libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server php5-mysqlnd
  
  # PowerShell used to provision with Windows
  iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
  choco install wamp-server
  

Beyond the talks presented there was also plenty of general developer chatter. Some of the topics discussed were:

• battleships servers - plus Ahmed has one in development
• Docker
• Ansible
• type systems
• formal methods
• javascript games development
• concurrency

Hopefully the last two of those topics are going to feature as talks at a future Tunbridge Wells dev meetup.

Unfortunately I was one of the first to leave for my commute back home so if I've missed any interesting topics please mention them in the comments and I'll update this post.