Portland Ruby Brigade meets CD Baby

Robby Russell — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:25:00 -0500

This is what happened to the Portland Ruby Brigade today:

Got double booked on meeting night with the PHP group
Got asked to leave after getting threats of the lights being turned off
Stayed almost til closing time at a brew… we heard, “Last Call!” and still continued talking…

Tonight I finally got to meet Ben, Caleb, Justin Watkins, Marcus Estes, Lennon Day-Reynolds, Jeremy Kempter (bitsweat), Aaron Johnson, and Peat Bakke-each for the first time. I also got to see Scott Laird (of Typo fame) and John Labovitz again. Scott and I met at FOSCON and John once found me when he was trying to hack people at a coffee shop and saw that I was on the wireless network. Okay, he wasn’t hacking… but found me at Urban Grind. :)

We had about ~25 people show up. I don’t think that there was a head count made. We sat around in a big circle and fired questions at both Derek Sivers and Jeremy Kemper. Topics ranged from how Derek found his way to PostgreSQL to why he thinks that he is an amazing web designer (smirk) to why Ruby and Rails was picked as the platform to move to from a PHP/MySQL system. Jeremy shared some insights into some problems with Rails that need to be worked on (boolean-stuff for example), tips on debugging, and many other things that I don’t recall off the top of my head.

It was a very relaxed and open conversation with some cool local developers who are working on getting their Rails/PostgreSQL system finished.

After we got kicked out of FreeGeek most of migrated to the Lucky Lab Pub… and then we realized that Derek and Jeremy didn’t show up. So, we found our ways to a big table and broke up into smaller conversations. I got stuck at the table with Ben, Scott, Caleb, and John. Actually, it was quite enjoyable. Scott talked about his work with Typo and Ben and I gave him some of our thoughts on things.

This is a horrible summary of the whole evening. It’s what I remember… and it’s late and I look forward to getting to hang out with this gang again in the future. I think that it was great to get to finally meet a few of the people that I have worked on some smaller projects with. If everything works out well, expect there to be some more projects coming out of the PDX.rb in the coming months. :-)

Thanks again to Derek Sivers and Jeremy Kemper for taking time out of their busy schedule to meet & greet with the Portland Ruby people. :-)

Robby on Rails: Portland Ruby Brigade meets CD Baby

Portland Ruby Brigade meets CD Baby