"Our little RubyJax is all growns up! He's growns up and he's growns up and he's growns up!" - with apologies to Vince Vaughn in Swingers
It's been over a year since I came to Hashrocket. (Actually, I came to Hashrocket before there was a Hashrocket, but that's another story.) New in town, I was disappointed that there was no Ruby users group in Jacksonville.
Thank goodness I went to that Refresh Jacksonville tech meetup. I met a bunch of great people at that meeting. Among them, a young man named Steven Bristol, of a company you may know, Less Everything. He'd been wanting to start a Ruby group, and I was certainly motivated to start one as well.
My long-time friend, and fresh Hashrocket hire, Jim "Big Tiger" Remsik soon joined the fray, and RubyJax was born. Our first meeting was very well-attended and very encouraging!
Since that first fateful meeting, we've covered a wide range of topics:
- RSpec
- bash shell
- spider testing
- advanced ActiveRecord
- Amazon EC2 & S3
- haml and sass
- pair programming
- jQuery, prototype, the Less Js Routes Plugin
- best practice patterns
- vim vs. TextMate
- testing
- website performance tips and tricks
My particular favorites were the pair programming, and "code & coffee" hack sessions. I'd like to see more of those in the future.
We've also had some great guests, including: some guy named Obie who is big into Rails or something, Desi McAdam who runs DevChix, Tim Pope who is rails.vim, Rein Henrichs who is for the moment slightly better than me at ping pong, Wilson Bilkovich of Rubinius and Engine Yard fame, and most recently Will Reed from ask.com.
It's been a great year. I've met some amazing people through this group. And with the exception of Steve, everyone is sharp and engaging and just generally pleasant to hang around with. ;) So, what's in store for next year? I think Big Tiger says it best:
"RubyJax is, exactly, no more and no less than what you make it."
Here's to RubyJax in 2009! Thanks, beloved members, for taking the time.
# Lark
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