I first learned of the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) through the Rails Pragmatic Studio that I took last December. I thought it would be a good place to pick up some new ideas and skills once I got more comfortable with Ruby and Rails. Soon afterward, I began working with James, who regularly attended the monthly meetings. There were many times I would hear “you would fit in well with the guys at RUM” or “some of the guys at the last RUM meeting were talking about that.” I always told myself that I should check it out, but I’d always forget about when the meeting was or I’d have something else going on that night.
Well, last month I finally decided I was going to make it to the meeting no matter what and I’m glad I went. I found the new location, the Acadia Cafe in downtown (or is it uptown?), with relative ease and took a seat in the auditorium style room. I probably should’ve sat closer to the middle of the room but the anti-social in me took over and made sat in the back of the room.
As the first presentation began, I thought to myself how weird and nerdy the casual cafe goer would think we were. There’s a bunch of people all staring at laptops and talking about writing code. Only the LAN parties we used to hold back in college rivaled the dork level in that room. Anyway, the first presentation immediately grabbed my attention. I had seen HAML before and didn’t think much of it. However, it’s CSS equivalent, SASS, was completely new to me and I think I had a little nerdgasm right there in my seat. Consequently, I haven’t done anything with it since, but I no doubt will.
The next presentation was on telecommuting/telecomputing. It was actually more of a discussion on the pros and cons. I’m a big fan of working from home and in my situation, I find there are little cons. Our other developer telecommutes 100% of the time, so my contact with him is through email and IM anyway. When I’m in the office, I usually put headphones on, and program away on my laptop; a task I can easily do anywhere there is an Internet connection. I also find that when I work from home, I am more productive. I can just put some loud music on, get buried on my project, and focus for long periods of time without being interrupted. A lot of the cons discussed in the meeting centered around project-specific metrics such as number of developers, distance of developers from each other, and language/locale difficulties. None of these are problems for me, so I only gave it half my attention.
The final two presentations were demos of projects. The first, FanChatter.com, was kind of cool, but I don’t think it’s anything I would use. The other, Lean-To.com, a project management app, was also of little interest to me.
As I said, I was relatively anti-social during most of the night, but I did end up talking to one gentleman in between presentations. Dave was just getting started with Rails and was having trouble getting his database data into his view pages. Drawing on my TA experiences, I tried to instruct him as best I could, but I have a feeling a lot was lost in translation. However, I gave him my card and invited him to email me if he had any questions. Maybe he did get it, because I haven’t heard from him yet.
I’m looking forward to the next meeting and whatever people come up with to present. The meetings are open to presentations by anyone, so maybe I can demo The Honeymoon once we finish it.