First Rochester Rails / Ruby Group Meeting

This past Thursday saw the very first meeting for the Rochester Ruby and Rails group. We met at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT, and had a significant RIT student and alumni contingent. As far as logistics go, it looks like we'll be meeting there regularly on the first and third Thursdays of each month starting up January 19th.

The group seems to be more dominated by those interested in Rails, but I'm hoping as we go along they'll want to learn more about the underlying langauge - after all, to get some of the significant gains in productivity they'll have to exploit language features like blocks and meta-programming. Happily, the format we decided on devotes time to two interactive discussion/presentations per meeting - one Ruby-language focused and the other Rails focused. It was a bit of a strange night - the Rochester area had a nice coating of slick ice (though I won't call it an "ice storm" because of the true Ice Storm when I was a kid. We lost power for two weeks!) - and almost no one brought their laptops. I suppose we all figured it was just our first meeting so it would be a meet and greet.

I'm also proud to say that the Rochester Ruby and Rails group has the entire RadRails development team as members as well as myself from the RDT developers. So we have a nice showing of ruby related eclipse experts ;)