Saturday, 7th February offers people involved or interested in software development for RISC OS the opportunity to once again to meet up online and discuss the issues and problems they face, seek help, offer advice, demonstrate what they’re working on, or just generally chat about the things programmers like to chat about.
The meetings take place using the Zoom video conferencing software, which is available for most platforms. They are wholly informal and don’t follow a set agenda – those present steer the conversation as the evening progresses – and as an example, at the last such meeting topics included:
- The speed of compiling code on some modern RISC OS machines.
- Gerph’s ‘live coding’ sessions on YouTube (which take place on Sunday’s from around 1pm).
- Tokenisation oddities with third party software handling BBC BASIC files.
- Issues in the BBC BASIC assembler when dealing with VFP and Neon – and from that, some general discussion of ARM instruction sets.
- Some of the new features found in the not yet released NemoBASIC.
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.