Proc.new

We kicked off the first Layton Ruby Brigade meeting last Tuesday. I was a bit nervous that nobody would show up other than Ceaser, but I was planning to have it either way. We ended up getting nine people to come, although three of them were from the Utah Valley contingent. Kevin Tew, Pat Eyler, and Pat’s son made the seventyish mile trek to our neck of the woods. We also had Aaron Toponce and Kevin Carter from the Ogden area Linux User Group show up. Finishing it out we had Russ Reed a local SQL Server Developer and my brother Torrey show up. Aaron, Kevin, Russ, and Torrey were all new to Ruby.

My initial thoughts were to prepare some presentation, but in the end I’m glad I didn’t. Any presentation I had prepared would probably not have been geared towards someone new to Ruby, and would have ended up getting scrapped. I also run a mailing list with about 30 people that I know in Northern Utah or that I have worked with over the years. I got several people who said they would probably come to another meeting if they had more notice next time (I forgot to send out the announcement to that list until the day of the meeting).

I have to throw a thanks out to my lovely wife who was kind enough to let us turn the living room into a meeting room with a couple of small tables, quite a few chairs and a projector I borrowed from the company I work for. As far as the pizza and refreshments, it looks like I bought enough to feed a group twice that size. For nine people we had four pizzas and about 12 liters of soda. I also made some habanero chili cheese dip. So if you missed the inaugural meeting you missed some good food. I suspect that in the future we won’t have quite as nice of a spread, but we’ll keep up with the pizza and soda.

After we had introduced ourselves and gotten a little acquainted we headed down to the living room to start talking about Ruby. Initially we fired up an IRB session and started talking about Ruby. I have to say, when confronted with a vast topic like explaining Ruby from scratch, it can be hard to know where to start. Once we got rolling though and people started asking some questions the discussion moved along more smoothly.

After some general discussion Kevin presented a quick project he hacked together to help him study words for the GRE. Going through the source code and talking it over really helped move the discussion along. It was really nice of Kevin and Pat to come all the way to our meeting. It was nice to have some people with more experience at running a user group.

After Kevin’s presentation, Pat showed us a framework he built for processing log files. Again having working code to discuss and talk through really propelled the meeting forward. During Pat’s presentation people were really starting to open up and ask a lot of questions about Ruby and it’s syntax and structure.

After his log file presentation Pat moved into a discussion about RubyInline. When I saw what could be done with RubyInline, I almost had to hold my jaw up. RubyInline is very impressive, and definitely something I could have used in the past. RubyInline allows you to define a class in say C, and it will automatically compile the class with C, but you can still use it within your Ruby program. But RubyInline does this with multiple languages. What was really nice was how simple and clean the interface was, and just how easy it makes it to solve some specific algorithm within Ruby but get the benefits of C or Fortran.

Overall I was very pleased with the meeting. It was great to meet people from the local area, and at the same time do something that will help drive Ruby as a language forward. Having done it now there are a few things I would do differently.

First of all, there is a tremendous amount of interest in Ruby as a language right now, so I would be more prepared to have people show up who know nothing about Ruby. Someone who takes the time to come to a Ruby User Group meeting but doesn’t know Ruby is someone who is very serious about learning Ruby. These are great people to really spend time helping.

Second, I would have a lot more prepared code to talk about. I would have some code that is relatively simple, up through relatively complicated code. I really enjoyed seeing code written by other people, even when the code is simple you encounter different ways of solving problems than you would do if you were solving the problem. When you run across code that embodies different thought patterns than your own it’s good to understand and learn those thought patterns. I am constantly amazed at how much I learn simply by reading other people’s code.

Finally, be open to letting the meeting wander away from some rigid presentation schedule, really interesting discussion happens when you just let it.

Thanks to everyone that helped make this meeting a success. We are probably going to move to meeting every two weeks instead of once a month, which is actually better for people who are learning. I think next time we’ll tackle some of the problems from the Ruby Quiz (thanks for the idea Pat).