Boulder Ruby User's Group
I went to the Boulder Ruby User's Group meeting on Wednesday, which was the first one I've attended. Ruby, and specifically Rails, are technologies I've wanted to learn more about for a long time, but never seem to muster the time and energy for a long enough period to really get going with either. As it was, I arrived at the meeting quite late, walking into the Q&A period on the first presentation, which was by a couple of guys from Absolute Performance on their systems monitoring applications, built with RoR. Actually, it was a re-write of an earlier Perl-based system, and I did catch bits of the success story involved - essentially an 8 month effort to do a complete rewrite. What was refreshing was some of the stories of having to live with what they'd built; for example, the presenter touched on issues with Mongrel. This is always the most essential part of a new technology, and something that's never covered in a tutorial.