November 19th, 2008
Hello! Yesterday sure was PACKED at MoR 13! Thanks to everybody for showing up, and most importantly to Jennifer and Rob for presenting. The presentations were very insightful.
As I mentioned last night, I decided to step down from my role at MoR and I will no longer be organizing the monthly events. It’s been a lot of fun but I felt the time had come for someone else to take over. Some new blood can’t hurt after roughly 1.5 year.
From now on, James Golick, a very experienced Ruby hacker will take the lead. James has great ideas for the group which he’ll announce shortly. It was important for me to pick someone who will take the group to new heights, and I truly believe James to be that guy.
As for myself, I’ll definitely make sure to participate in the upcoming meetings and I’ll be glad to assist James as much as he wants me to. It’s been fun meeting you all and I look forward to next meeting!
Carl
By Carl Mercier • Posted in
Follow-up,
Misc. •
4 Comments
November 14th, 2008
Our 13th meetup will be held on November 18 at Standout Jobs, 6:30pm as usual.
The lineup is:
- Rob Britton: An introduction to jQuery
- Jennifer Bell: Citizen Activism for Government Transparency: Scraping Government Data Using Scrubyt and Rails
We’ll also have a big announcement to make regarding Montreal on Rails, so make sure to show up!
See you then!
By Carl Mercier • Posted in
Meetings •
Comments Off
November 4th, 2008
Over the last year or so, I’ve really enjoyed Montreal on Rails. There have been lots of awesome presentations, and general good times had by all.
When Carl asked for feedback on Uservoice, a lot of people seemed interested in more presentations geared towards newbies. While presentations can be really interesting and useful, most of the best programmers I know learned their craft through open source work. There’s no better way to improve your skills (not to mention your profile in the industry).
So, I’ve been thinking about organizing a monthly, open source hackfest.
It would be an informal evening where people could come and work on FLOSS. If you have a project, it would be a great place to get help from some of your local ruby gurus, or just an excuse to work on your project. If not, it’d be a great place to pick up a project and learn from other developers.
At the end of every evening, we could have a few lightning talks (5mins), to give people the opportunity to show off what they’ve been working on. Or not, if nobody wants to speak. Only rule: no preparation allowed. No slides. Nothing.
Think of it sort of like Zed Shaw’s Freehacker’s Union, minus the hazing ritual for new members.
So, what do you think? If we turned MoR in to an open source hack fest for a couple of months, would you miss the presentations? Is this something you’re interested in trying out? Will you be offended if we open it up to all things Ruby, instead of just rails?
By James Golick • Posted in
Uncategorized •
14 Comments