Toronto Ruby on Rails Pub Night

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.