TerminusDB Discussions

One of the really nice things about TerminusDB is our weekly get together where one team member gives a short presentation on something. It doesn’t have to be work, it doesn’t have to be TerminusDB, it can be anything really.

We are a moderately distributed team and we have plenty of opportunity for detailed technical discussion (indexing strategy anyone?) so we thought that it’d be a good idea to start a less formal weekly exchange. One member of the team leads the discussion and the rest contribute with questions & comments.

Over the year and a bit since we started the tradition, we’ve had everything from the innards of JavaScript to Crypto Kitties to Theories of Developer Relations to Cloud Architecture to the Dialectics of Software Development (a personal favorite — I must post the slides).

The right superstructure is important

We’ve also had nuclear power, the political economy of open source software, values vs virtues and Terry Davis (TempleOS is something else — I’d encourage all to check it out).

Really whatever was of special interest to the person assigned that day. I looked back through the chat and realize that I have suggested ‘Practical Maoism for the Workplace’ twice and nobody has taken up my lead.

The system's features, such as its 640x480 resolution, 16-color display and single audio voice, were explicitly instructed to Terry Davis by God

The tradition has grown to be an important part of every TerminusDB week. If we continue to grow the core group, I’m not sure how we’ll scale — 1 week in 30 might be a little infrequent. We can cross that bridge when we get there.

So anyway, we really value these discussions and thought the the broader Terminus Community might also enjoy. We’ve recorded the latest discussion, which took place yesterday, and uploaded it to our YouTube channel.

This week we were led by our BDFL Gavin in a discussion of ‘Regular Expressions - Theory and Practice’. It covers a bunch of interesting aspects including Chomsky’s Hierarchy, Büchi automata, grammars and much more.

I apologize for the sound quality issues — we’ll work on a setup that captures the various contributors in high fidelity. At least you can hear the main presentation. Only one instance of adult language — less than normal I’d say — so be warned.

This will be a regular series, so watch this space.