If you’re in St. Louis, I’ll be speaking at two groups this week.

First up in a preview for the Gateway Software Symposium next month, I am doing my Java 7 talk at the Gateway Java User Group on Tuesday at 6 pm. I’ve been following the progress of Java 7 for a long time now and things are finally starting to get real. This talk goes through the current status and a number of the APIs that are likely to be included.

I highly recommend the Gateway Software Symposium (part of the No Fluff Just Stuff conference tour), which is March 6th to 8th this year. I am biased as a speaker myself of course, but having been to a bunch of conferences NFJS is the best bang for your buck you’ll get out of any conference around. The speakers are world-famous authors and presenters and I am humbled that they let me show up and carry their bags. I’ve learned an enormous amount from watching them speak and you can too. Many of the talks these guys do on the tour are the same talks they do at bigger conferences that cost a lot more to attend. So do yourself and your career a favor and see them in your own backyard.

This Thursday is also the next installment of the Lambda Lounge, the local user group focused on functional and dynamic languages. This month’s meeting has two topics. First, Nate Young will be talking about functional programming in Javascript. Specifically, he will talk about some aspects of the Lambda Calculus and how they can be implemented in Javascript and how to use method chaining/continuation passing to develop event-driven web pages. And then yours truly will be talking about actor concurrency focusing on examples in Erlang. It’s sure to be a rocking good time as always.

If you’re interested, please come out at 6 pm on Thursday. We’ve had strong attendance at the first couple meetings of the Lounge and I’m hoping to make it a trend. Future meetings already have great topics planned like F#, monads, Factor, the Parrot VM, and a language shootout.

I’ll also mention that I recently put together a list of St. Louis user groups if you’re interested in finding what else is out there.