For people in or near London who are not on the London Ruby mailing
list:
<snip>
See you there!
and David did indeed see us there, 11 of us in fact which apparently
is something of a miracle
A good night was had by all, though most of it was spent introducing
ourselves to each other in the pub, then around 10 it was off to get
food at an Indian restraunt down the road. A proper report is on the
way later I believe (there was someone there keeping minutes).
···
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 01:26:08 +0900, David A. Black <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:
Here are some brief notes from the Feb 2005 London Ruby Group meeting.
We had 11 people in attendance, including four Robert's, which was a
little confusing. We did a round table each speaking about our Ruby
connections, interspersed and followed by general discussion and quite
a few pints. All agreed to get onto the ruby-talk IRC channel if they
weren't already. If you want to find out about plans for the next
London meeting subscribe to the Ruby London list: http://browser.org/mailman/listinfo/rubylondon
Below is a summary of some points of interest from the meeting, please
add or correct if necessary. The lists are probably quite incomplete.
Ruby is being used in:
- UK Parliament House of Commons - for publishing
- Communications agency in the advertising market
- New startup in stealth-mode
- Various opensource/academic projects
Some topics talked about (very incomplete list):
- Ruby being used in commercial projects
- scalability of Rails/Active Record
- test-first programming - requires discipline but worth it!
- speed of performance vs. speed of development and maintenance (will
yarv be there to improve the former?)
- telecommuting being socially depressing
- sometimes easier to write solution in Ruby than download Ruby tool
- Ruby community is helpful to all - term "egoless programmers" was mentioned
Some things being written in Ruby:
- PhD research work (GIS)
- Miscellaneous scripting
- News aggregator
- Topic map serialization api
- World data visualization service
- HTTP cache gem
Things being done for Ruby:
- Providing jobs for Ruby prog'rs (thanks Sean and Ben!)
- Ruby London mailing list server
- Ruby plugin for jEdit
Ruby frameworks/tools in use:
- Rails/Active Record
- Needle
- Instiki
Languages used in day job:
- Ruby
- Perl
- Java
- .Net/C#
Ruby editor survey approx. results (some people listed more than once):
vi/vim - 4
textmate - 2
textedit/textpad - 2
scite - 1
emacs - 1
jedit - 1 (Rob McKinnon is working on Ruby plugin)
eclipse/rdt - 1 (Rob McGovern co-authored "Eclipse in Action" book)
freeride - 1
arachno - 1
whatever's there - 1
Thanks to all who were there. A good night, hopefully followed by many
more in the coming months.