I attended Coding for Fun at Exoweb office on Saturday, September 4th 2010. The event is held monthly by BLUG. It was the first BLUG activity that I joined, so it was really meaningful. Well, this post should have been written several days ago, it was postponed because my right eye felt bad looking at the screen these days.

The event began at 11AM. Peter and I went there at about 9 O’clock in the morning, but we reached the destination at nearly 1pm. We were not familiar with that region, therefore we spent most of time on the trip and little time enjoying our lunch.

Frankly speaking, I felt very worried when Peter told me one has to introduce one’s project to all the attenders in English. I didn’t work on my own project those days, and I just used QGit to learn Qt. What should I say? I thought I have nothing to show. Peter perceived my worried mind. In order to relieve my feeling, Peter suggested me that I could talk about some tools that were used to debug, manage your project. So I decided to talk about GDB that I was studying.

Finally, we got to the place. The Exoweb office was not large but neat, tidy and colorful. In the middle of the office, there was a staircase to the resting room and meeting room. The resting room was very cute and comfortable, on the left side a big yellow shelf was filled with a lot of English technical books, several musical instruments leaning against a sofa, and many staffs’ perfect photographs adhering to the glass wall. The office was like a home, not a company. All the people in the upstairs room, were all friendly, and we said hi to each other.

There were three foreigners who were the core members of BLUG. I knew the handsome one was Xuedi, the tall and strong one was Ollo. Peter always mentioned them to me. I saw them finally.

There were many blank positions in the meeting room, so we found two chairs to sit on, and laid our laptop on the table. A boy told us the wifi password, then we could use wireless to access web.

New attender arrived continually. All attenders were men except me, and they talked happily. About 4pm, a girl showed up in the office. I felt really happy. The girl called Rui who had worked in IT field for six years. She was interested in piano, so she was busy with a project named drumstick which simulated piano using computer keyboard. The project was really interesting. She also used Qt, but she mainly used Eclipse in windows. She told me how to install Eclipse supporting C++ in Ubuntu. I appreciated her help.

At 5pm, the event holder told us it’s time to introduce your project to all people. Oh, I felt a little nervous, though people there were kind and lovely. Everyone was required to introduce what he or she has done recently to audience and wrote down on the board. First, Ollo introduced himself and his project, in a quick way. Then came Xuedi, and so on. I felt better now and I knew what I should say. When it came to my turn. I said the following words:

My English name is Billie Zhang, name of a song. I have been working on a
project named QGit. I trace my code base with Cscope and manage my code
with Git. Git is a really powerful tool.

After my speech, everyone gave me a warm applause. It was very kind of them. I was very delighted.

Thanks to Coding for Fun! Thanks to all the contributors to the BLUG! I learned so much from them. It was a really happy day and meaningful experience.