Hi all,

We’ve got a great Tech Talk coming up this week, with Gold sponsor Stripe. It’s a great opportunity to see how some of the programming theory you might learn at university is applied in practice.

We’re taking a break from socials this weekend, as CompSoc is heading to Oxford Hack! If you’re taking part, you might want to have a go at winning our prize category: Most Useless Hack! We’ll be back next weekend for some Oxmas celebrations, including a meal out before the usual festivities in the UGSA. More details to follow on that soon!

Have a great week!

- Kate and the rest of the committee


Events

Building For Scale: How and Why Stripe Built Sorbet, a Type Checker for Ruby

19:00, Wednesday, Week 5, LTA, Department of Computer Science

Stripe builds the economic infrastructure for the Internet. Each year we handle billions of dollars on behalf of Internet businesses — and most of the logic for handling that money is written in Ruby. Ruby’s dynamic types made for high initial developer velocity, but over time as the codebase grew that same feature became a hindrance. With millions of lines of code already written and hundreds of engineers writing more each day, Stripe decided to create a fast, gradual typechecker for Ruby, called Sorbet.

Come hear about the process of developing Sorbet, some of the problems it seeks to solve, and some perspective on types and programming language design from an industry perspective.

Tech Talk with CoreFiling: What they don’t teach you at university - software development stories from a small business

19:00, Wednesday, Week 6, LTA, Department of Computer Science

What happens when you try and put your knowledge into practice with some real-world programming? How do you deal with code once it’s 15 years old, or there are over 1 million lines of it? How do you balance the advantages of new technology against the cost of training a team? And how do you scale up from one person and their keyboard to a room full of developers working towards the same goal? Assuming you solve all of that, what do you do when a customer e-mails four hours before their deadline to say “it’s broken”?

David North, CompSoc alumnus and now Head of Engineering at local software firm CoreFiling, will attempt to answer the above with some stories from his 10 years since graduating.


The Oxford University Computer Society (CompSoc) aims to organise meetings and events for our members to use and further their computing interests. See all of our upcoming events on our Facebook page or visit our website for more information about the society.

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