First Meeting notes 6/7/2006
George Kowalski
The first meeting of the Milwaukee Ruby user's group was a great kick
off. In all we had 19 people attend and filled the room to it's
capacity. The meeting started out with Pitzza, drinks and a big fruit
bowl ( thanks Tom ) . We finally got to meet some of those people we
have chatted with by email. Ed Chaltry was elected to take notes at
this first meeting.
All,
We formally started the meeting with a round of Introductions. We have
4 people that are using Ruby professionally. Kirk received the award
for coming the longest distance to our meeting - from Wyoming. He has a
couple of clients here in the milwaukee area that are using Ruby
through his company.
Next we talked about the focus of the group. George started out with a
review of the history of Ruby Groups. Some groups get togeather to hack
code, others for presentations, and other add other dynamic languages.
It was decided that our group would focus on Ruby and Rails to start
off with.
Some of the discussion during this period as noted by Ed:
Vibhu brought up idea of a company sponsor. This will help pay for
speakers, rooms, etc. There is adminisrative overhead also to be
covered.
Vibhu also recommended covering topics and chapters from books.
Cobbie: How about several presenters in the next group meeting to
discuss what they feel is the best feature of Ruby.
Look at sponsoring a Ruby project. for example projects look at
Rubyforge.org.
Someone suggested a walk-through for Capistrano (the old SwitchTower)
for Rails?
Madison Ruby Group is meeting next Monday June 12th for a code session.
See ( http://www.madisonrails.com/wiki )
Jeremy: Should we create a steering committee?
Vibhu: This room is available until 7:30. If we need the bigger room,
it is $40.
Ed: Alternate between Ruby and Rails presentations.
Mike's suggestion: next meeting cover overview of Ruby, along with 4
folks discussing their favorite features.
Vibhu also suggested Cobbie contact Dion A to see if he will speak.
The final decision of the group was:
- The group will meet monthly.
- Next Meeting: Wednesday July 12, same location.
Topic of the next meeting: Several short introductions: Intro Ruby
(Tom), (Geoff, some topic Meta programming). Others interested in
presenting should email George with topic and timeframe.
We also talked about the groups leadership. As the group was just
forming and not everyone new each other, it was decided that George
Kowalski and Tom Jordan co-run the group for 6 months. We would have
elections to pick positions at that time.
For the next meeting in August, we are looking at a Ruby on Rails intro
sessions , again with several people taking short intros into the
various parts of rails.
Next the discussion went on the the groups web site. George talked to a
hosting company ( www.yawebhost.com ) and had already secured site
hosting for free. This company sub-leases from Rails Playground.com. It
was suggested, and accepted by the group that a "Webmaster Group" be
formed to manage this site. DJ, Jordon, and Jeremey all volunteered to
be part of this group to get things set up. Initially we want to keep
it simple with only a wiki being set up.
The email list that Vibhu set up in google groups was choosen for the
group as it's means of communication so the current list will be shut
off after everyone is moved over.
Final Action items were that DJ is going to register the domain and
George is going to work with Wes Rood to get the site up , then work
with the Webmaster group to get the site up and running.
The Group name and domain name of the group were kicked around for
awhile with everyone settling on:
"The Milwaukee Ruby Users Group" for the name and
www.mkerb.org for the groups domain name.
George asked if the group wanted to have food brought in, but it was
decided this would be too complex to organize, so future meetings will
be bring your own food.
The meeting location for now would remain the same at SpiderLogic, with
the people from CTS offering to start hosting some meetings after they
move into their new Location in West Allis.
If I've missed anything, please let me know...
Thanks again to Vibhu and SpiderLogic for the use of their beautiful
facilities.
See you next month. - George Kowalski
wyha...@gmail.com
who is a devoted Tolkein fan. A subset of the participants on the
Tolkein newsgroup have an ongoing, chapter by chapter study of the
various books. They take a book and everyone volunteers to lead the
study of a different chapter.
Perhaps this group might do something similar? Take the Pickaxe2 book,
and each month a different person leads a presentation about the
primary subject matter in that chapter?
Also, I'll make a standing offer for a presentation whenever I can get
back to Milwaukee at the same time as an mkerb meeting. For a couple
years I have wanted to write an article comparing and contrasting web
development frameworks. I'm working a little more seriously towards
that as I finally am getting my framework (IOWA) very close to a 1.0
release. So, whenever it can be made to happen, I'll do one comparing
and constrasting Rails, Nitro, Camping, and IOWA via the development of
a simple real world application.
The intent being to illuminate, side by side, the philosophical and
practical differences between the frameworks, and hopefully shed some
light on relative strengths and weaknesses of each.
Kirk Haines
Griff
Currently I am very interested in how people use Ruby to solve
real-world
problems on billable work. I don't particularly care how "exciting"
that work may
have been; I just want to know what are the problems we can expect to
face
and good solutions for them. If there is some cool stuff, even better.
Kirk Haines
> Currently I am very interested in how people use Ruby to solve
> real-world
> problems on billable work. I don't particularly care how "exciting"
> that work may
> have been; I just want to know what are the problems we can expect to
> face
> and good solutions for them. If there is some cool stuff, even better.
My experience is that I don't really use Ruby for different work than
I would some other general purpose interpreted language. I could be
using Perl for all of the purposes that I use Ruby, for instance. But
I enjoy using Ruby more, and I think I am more productive with it than
I ever was with Perl. So, I use Ruby.
I primarily use it for dynamic web sites and web applications, for
systems administration tasks, and for automated ETL and data
handling/transport tasks. All of the above is done on a billable
basis for various customers.
Kirk Haines
Tom Jordan
I did not realize you were the author of IOWA. That is so cool.
I am definitely interested in your comparison of the frameworks.
August is focusing on Rails and this would shoe in splendidly. :-)
-- Tom.
--
"Nothing will ever be attempted, if all
possible objections must first be
overcome." - Samuel Johnson
"Luck is what happens when
preparation meets opportunity." - Seneca
Kirk Haines
>
> Kirk:
>
> I did not realize you were the author of IOWA. That is so cool.
> I am definitely interested in your comparison of the frameworks.
> August is focusing on Rails and this would shoe in splendidly. :-)
We'll have to see how the next month goes. It might be possible to arrange it.
I'm obviously a bit biased, but my goal is to do a relatively
impartial comparison despite my biases, probably using some small,
simple application one of my customers is using as the vehicle for
making comparisons. But...we'll see how it goes. I need to get 1.0
of IOWA released, first.
Kirk Haines