RubyJax Inaugural Meeting
Originally posted 2007-11-17 02:37:34
Last Thursday I attended the inaugural meeting of RubyJax, the new Ruby users group in Jacksonville, Florida. I drove straight from work and strode into the meeting wearing a golf shirt, crisp khakis, and tan Cole Haans, and instantly felt overdressed. A few people sported clean jeans and polos, but I’d have blended much better in a techno T-shirt, battered dungarees, and sandals. Hoops and baubles festooned nostrils and earlobes, and I knew instantly that these folks never proactively facilitated synergies nor thought outside the box to formulate win-win action plans. These were bohemian coders, not corporate drones, but they betrayed no suspicion when extending me hellos and handshakes. In fact, these bonhomous bit-twiddlers welcomed each newcomer as if reconnecting with long-lost cousins at Uncle Dale’s family reunion. I’m used to more reticence and reserve at technical meetups, and I enjoyed the agreeable ambiance. We were there to connect and have fun, not hide behind Dependency Injectors or Object-Relational Mappers.
Twenty-one people attended the meeting. Read that sentence again. Twenty-one. For the kickoff meeting about a language that no North Florida corporation will officially touch. I’ve rarely seen that many people attend a JaxJUG meeting, and that group has been around for years and draws from scores of Java-centric local companies. In the rare moments that Jacksonville commands national attention, like when the Super Bowl came to town awhile back, the national press paints us as a hick town, a village of rubes more familiar with motor oil, Skoal, and moonshine than with silicon, compilers, and closures. I never imagined I’d meet so many Ruby programmers in the former Cowford. In addition, some of the attendees, apparently, are luminaries in the Rails scene, as measured by Working with Rails. For example, a gaggle of ThoughtWorks refugees attended, including Obie Fernandez, series editor of Addison-Wesley’s Ruby series and author of the upcoming The Rails Way, and Desi McAdam, one of the founders of devChix, a community for promoting software development among women. I remembered when one of the developers at work thanked me for sending him to RailsConf 2007, gushing, \”I got to see real live celebrities! I stood beside DHH!\” I can’t claim the same level of adulation–it’s tough for mere software developers to compete with the moment I shook Dr. J’s hand–but I certainly appreciate that a core of Ruby and Rails significance lives here on the First Coast.
We sat in a circle and spent the meeting introducing ourselves and asking each other questions about what we’re doing with Ruby. I quickly discerned that safe would not impress this crowd, so I merely confessed that I no longer program professionally, and have only played with Ruby and Rails. Some from the crowd were no farther along the Ruby path than I, but many program Ruby and Rails full-time. Small shops, either product-focused or consultancies, seemed to dominate. That world fascinates me, probably because I know so little about it and can only imagine how it works. Even during my contracting days, I always had one main client in whose offices I sat for 40+ hours a week, so I can only speculate how to chase and find enough clients to keep steady work, or how to keep the coffers full enough to meet payroll while working on and hawking products. I guess I’m a low-risk sucker for a steady paycheck, but I can admire from afar. The people in the room didn’t seem as stressed as folks in our offices are. The technical skill level seemed, at least, to be very high, which is what I’d expect from early adopters of a code-based, not point-and-click based, technology. I enjoyed the meeting, and regret I’ll miss the December one for business travel. I’ll be back for January’s meeting–this time in cutoffs and Crocs!
Incidentally, I’m not sure who chose the name \”RubyJax,\” but I’d have transposed it: JaxRuby. That would have been killer.