First Ruby Meetup
By “First”, I mean “The First Ruby Meetup I’ve Attended.” The group has been meeting for several months. It seems like this past meeting attendance really blew up, which is great for the group. There was a good mix of new-to-Ruby people (like myself), and a few folks that had been working with Ruby for quite a while. The majority of people mentioned Rails during introductions. It was a good meetup, and looks like it’s going to be a solid user group.
There was some more talk about a joint Rails / Django presentation in the very near future, which should be exciting. I’m not sure about calling it a “debate” though, what are we debating? The overriding theme of every user group I’ve attended has been “what sets us apart from others is our love of what we do.” Sadly, this is sometimes interpreted as “what sets us apart from others is our choice of programming language.” That, to me, is the wrong attitude. Spending time cutting down other like minded people, because of their language choice, doesn’t help anyone. A debate between the author of Django, and the author of Rails is counter-productive. Both guys saw a need for a new way of building a web application, both guys built a set of tools that are valuable to the new model web. Why pit them against one another?
I think competition is good, as long as we understand that we’re really tied together through our common love of the work, beyond our love of the particulars of our chosen tools.