Went up to Kansas City and met with some people from Databasically. Had a great time, one of the things we did was an exercise where you spend 45 minutes on a program several times in a row (deleting your code after each), to see different approaches and ideas. I enjoyed this quite a bit, and got some ideas such as using watchr for auto testing, and a better feel for RSpec.
Our program was Conway's Game of Life, and I enjoyed it enough that I decided to complete it over the weekend. There are a few things that could be done to make it better (ie graphics based input format), but it meets all my needs at present and I'm pretty happy with it. Especially I think I did fairly well on the RSpec part. Though there were some times where I wasn't really sure what to do next. I think using Cucumber would have taken care of those, maybe over the summer I'll reread that first portion of the RSpec book and try doing it again with Cucumber.
Anyway, here's an example output so you can see basically how it works without having to actually install it. And here's a narrative where I walk through it a little bit.
At its simplest, game_of_life this will choose decent defaults for you, and run it against Gosper's Glider Gun.
You have a number of options available, as well, in particular seeding and changing the dimensions. To see the options use game_of_life -h.
This code is unmaintained.
If you do something interesting with it, let me know so I can be happy.
Copyright (c) 2011 Joshua Cheek
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