Is there interest in a Boston Haml / Sass Meetup group?

[Marsh Sutherland]

Hi Boston Rubyists,

I used to be the organizer for the Boston Javascript Meetup group.

I see Haml / Sass being more and more prevalent on the front-end for Ruby-built startups.

Is there interest in a Boston Haml / Sass Meetup group?

Marsh Sutherland
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[Alex Jarvis]

I'd be interested! 

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Alex M. Jarvis
www.AlxJrvs.com
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[Brian Cardarella]

If you're serious about doing a meetup on this I would focus on Sass. Haml is probably a 20 minute conversation at best.

Even with a focus on Sass, I would suggest not meeting every month. You'll burn out of content pretty quickly. Maybe 4 times a year?

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[Rebecca Frankel]

If the general idea is "front end technology," perhaps excluding the whole huge bucket of Javascript, Jquery & Coffeescript, then there might be more than just Sass to talk about. I think there is a bunch of things that can be done with font technology now that @font-face is solidly here and OpenType support is on the horizon --- icon fonts, ligature hacking (for instance this "charting" font http://tktype.com/chartwell.php), stuff like that. 

 Plus Sass as a technology might not be that hard to learn, but Sass is also an attitude: the idea of taking the programmer's values of modularity and composability and applying them to the design world where they are somewhat foriegn ideas. There is a lot to say about that, and I think the surface has only been scratched.  As a small example, here is a grid system built with Sass that has "fractional elements," i.e. one-half, one-third: 

http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2011/08/21/responsive-layouts-with-sass/

which, as he says, "allows for development of shared modules that align to the grid without knowledge of where they will be placed in a template." This kind of thing could allow for quite different kind of design applications. 

I'm not quite sure what Marsh's concept was, but depending on his intentions, I could see quite a bit of material in this general vein showing up. I'm not sure how big the pool of Bostonians who would go for it is, though. 

 Anyway, I'd certainly be interested. 

Rebecca 

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[Marsh Sutherland]

I was thinking of what the hot technologies are for front-ending to Ruby on Rails, Haml / Sass, Coffeescript, Mustache.

If this would be duplicate programming to what Boston Ruby already covers, then I wouldn't start the meetup.  I know I've seen Coffeescript covered, but don't remember seeing Haml / Sass covered or Mustached.

When I ran the Boston Javascript Meetup, there were a ton of topics to be covered on Javascript / HTML / CSS.

Pascal is doing a good job running meetups around HTML5 / CSS3 right now.

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[Jeremy Weiskotten]

I gave a talk on Haml and Sass a couple years ago (before it was cool!). I agree that there isn't really enough going on there to warrant a monthly user group on just those tools, but maybe something that  covers the wider front-end development scene could be interesting.

In this vein, Aaron White from Boundless Learning is giving a talk at NERD tomorrow night on their front-end stack which should be pretty interesting (I can't make it unfortunately).

http://www.meetup.com/TechinmotionBoston/events/81702142/

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[Chris Maxwell]

I like the idea of this type of meetup group. I think you may want to consider broadening the scope of the meetup though. It might be a good idea to keep the group open to a variety of front end coding ideas and concepts, but opinionated in its choice of technology to implement them in. Maybe call it the Front End Coder's Meetup? Speakers can then come and talk about pretty much anything "front-endy".

Lately I've been writing an e-book called, "The Front End Code Manifesto." First off it's free, and not finished, but in thinking about it as it relates to this meetup group idea, there are things in the Table of Contents that might not necessarily fit into the HAML/SASS category, but are probably interesting and relevant to front end coder's and their work: Usability/IA, Object Oriented CSS, SEO, Image Optimization, Responsive Web Design, Mobile First Development, etc. (all of which have nothing really to do with sass or haml). Personally, I'm highly opinionated; everything I write is from a Rails perspective, specifically HAML/SASS, but at the same time I am open to and continuously trying to learn about everything to do with views.

Just my $.02. I think it would be great have some kind of meeting devoted to front end coding.

Chris

If you're interested in checking out my very rough unfinished "book" it is located here: https://github.com/maxxiimo/Front-End-Code-Manifesto.

I do have some good sass and haml boilerplates referenced in my manifesto that anyone is welcome to use:

Basic view files and partials I use in a lot of projects…
 https://github.com/maxxiimo/base-files

.sass and .scss conversions of normalize.css, HTML 5 Boilerplate's styles.css, and Eric Meyer's original reset 2.0…
 https://github.com/maxxiimo/sass-resets

The basics sass files and structure I use in projects…
 https://github.com/maxxiimo/css-base

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[Victor Costan]

I'd be interested in Sass / Scss!

I'd like to talk / hear about using Sass to bring better engineering to CSS. I think there is a lot of stuff to talk about.

For example, I'd like to learn / share my thoughts about building widgets and layouts, about putting together mini-frameworks off of compass, and about studying/customizing blueprint and bootstrap. I'd also enjoy listening to presentations that go over techniques for taming layouts -- they're all spread in blog posts and books, and it's hard to "catch up".

Last, I'd also like to explore extending Sass to reduce the manual steps in producing assets. Compass helps with sprites, and I think that's only the beginning. For example, WebKit's filter directive is very useful, but it's not cross-browser. I'd like to have an image generator that accepts filter syntax. Converting fonts to eot/svg/otf/ttf also seems ripe for automation, though it's probably harder and less useful. 

In any case, my point was I think there's a lot to explore, from a Sass / CSS engineering perspective. I'd definitely be interested in attending.
    Victor

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Marsh Sutherland <ma...@referralbon.us> wrote:

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[Marsh Sutherland]

I'm thinking between running Angelhack in Boston, co-organizing Startup Weekends around the country, and ReferralBonus and Walden Recruiting, I'm too busy to start a new Meetup group.

If someone else wants to take the lead on this, I am happy to co-organize a meetup and educate the Organizer how to schedule, build the group, and hype the events.  

Else perhaps Brian could dedicate one presentation slot every other month to front-end tech for Ruby at existing Ruby meetings so there doesn't have to be yet one more meeting to go to.

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[Brice Stacey]

I think it'd make more sense to encourage someone to propose a haml/sass talk.

Also, there is a Boston Fron End Developers group. They had a SASS/Compass talk in May, though it's not focused exclusively on ruby. http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Frontend-Developers/

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