The next friendly fireside chat for people interested in RISC OS software development will take place at 7:30pm on Saturday, 22nd November. Taking place online via the Zoom video conferencing service, these meetings are intended as an informal way of allowing RISC OS programmers, and anyone interested in the subject, to get together online to discuss relevant matters.
There is no set agenda for these online meetings, and instead the discussion is steered by what people want to talk about. People are free to ask questions or bring up (and even show off) things they are working on.
For example, at the last meeting in September, topics that came up included the problem of meaningless error messages, and the distinction between error messages aimed at programmers, and those suitable for users. For C programmers, a subject that was discussed was the ‘safety’ of some standard string functions and memory handling. Other topics included using pointers safely, modules, private words, and multiple instantiations.
The meetings are open to anyone, regardless of their programming prowess – you could be someone with no programming experience looking for advice on where to begin and what tools to use, an expert with many years of development behind you, or anything between the two extremes; all are welcome.
To join the meeting, you will need a platform on which Zoom can be run, along with the meeting credentials. If you’ve joined a previous fireside chat, those credentials remain unchanged, but if not you can get them via one of these routes:
- You can contact Andrew McCarthy on Twitter or Mastodon – or indeed from your RISC OS computer using ChatCube.
- Or you can send an email to me here in the RISCOSitory bunker. Please note, though, that any emails sent to me on the day of the meeting itself will not receive a reply until very close to the meeting’s start time!
If you can’t wait until the next meeting to discuss RISC OS development issues with others, or want to continue a discussion started at the meeting, there is also now a Discord discussion forum – The RISC OS Coding Community.