I spent half the weekend with a mild fever and feeling completely out
of it. So out of it, in fact, that I voluntarily watched both Lake Placid and Scary Movie 3 (the edited-for-television versions, no less) on TBS. Hence I was feeling a bit off my game on Monday and decided not to bring the accordion to the Ruby on Rails Pub Night at C’est What. Unfortunately, I also forgot to bring some Tucows swag — our coveted “squishy cows”, pictured below:
As
the developer relations guy, forgetting the swag before attending a
developer meetup is about the same as forgetting to put on your pants
before stepping out. Next pub night (tentatively scheduled for Monday,
April 17th), there shall be squishy cows. This I promise.
As
for the Ruby on Rails event itself, it went quite well. Pete Forde, one
of the organizers said that his guess, based on yesterday’s rotten
weather, was ten people, gathered around a long table, would be a good
turnout. He was quite pleased to see twenty-five.
Pete’s company, Unspace,
is a company that develops web applications using Rails. He noted that
some clients are a bit wary of firms that use Rails because of the
“What if they’re hit by a bus?” factor — that is, the fear that no one
else will be able to maintain their applications because they’re
implemented in a framework and a language that doesn’t have the broad
user base of something like PHP, Java or .NET. He’d like to see a
healthy ecosystem of local Rails developers, and given the way
Accordion City is, there should be more than enough work to go around.
I got a chance to meet Austin Ziegler, author of the PDF::Writer module, which makes creating printouts in Ruby dirt simple (see the “Hello World” example in this Artima article to see how simple).
I suggested that he demonstrate it at an upcoming DemoCamp, to which he
replied that his presentation could be demonstrating how PDF::Writer
can be used to make his presentation for PDF::Writer right in front of
the audience — the sort of recursive thing that programmers like.
Of course, David Crow was there. That’s the sign of a tech event worth visiting.
I
met a number of other Ruby/Rails developers there and had a chance to
chat with a good number of them. A number of us, myself included, have
come from the world of developing “enterprise” or “business”
applications using Microsoft development tools and databases, others
are Java guys trying to escape Rube Golberg Machine
coding and some are young enough and lucky enough to star their
programming careers with Ruby and Rails. A couple of us — myself
included again, told some amusing Captain Crunch
stories and other ribald tales of the sometimes-sordid underbelly of
the nerd world. From the looks of it, we all had a good time, and I
think the future of the Rails Pub Night is promising. My thanks to Pete
and the folks at Unspace for putting the event together.
