Now that RubyConf 2008 is over ...

Ok, RubyConf 2008 is over (and I missed all the fun). Besides reading (or writing) about all the awesome presentations and the incredible hallway session, what should we be doing? Let me pitch two simple ideas that will help spread the joy that RubyConf brings.

1. Come back to your local Ruby Brigade and share the wealth. Tell people what you learned and why it's important. Even better, start building on what you learned and share that knowledge too. Record your meetings and post the audio/video, or write about them at your blog. This is a great chance to share and build on the vision that you caught while you were in Orlando.
2. Put together a proposal for your local Regional Conference. There's too much intellectual value in the community to keep it all bottled up. Whether you're planning on going to GoRuCo, the Ruby Hoedown, Ruby Fringe, MWRC, or some other conference nearer and dearer to your hear, you can make it better by getting involved.

Neither of these is all that hard. Give one (or both) of them a try. You and your fellow rubyists will be glad that you did.

Well, that was disappointing

For last night’s UtahValley.rb meeting (Sep 25th), we had two Microsoft guys come fly in to talk about IronRuby and another hacker come to talk about Ruby.NET. I was deeply disappointed—not by either of the projects or the presentations, but because we only got 5 people to show up, and as we all know “Five is right out.”

So, what went wrong? We (Mike Moore and I) talked things up on the URUG mailing list over the last three weeks, Mike tried to engage the local .NET groups, we even came up with a bunch of schwag to give away (three books and a copy of Halo 3). With all that, we still had one of the poorest turn-outs in a while. I can think of several things that might have been the problem:

• there’s just not a lot of local interest in Ruby on the CLR/DLR—but even if you’re not interested in that implementation (I’m not), this was a pretty cool opportunity to learn more about it and about Ruby in general.
• there’s just not a lot of local interest in Ruby—I really hope this isn’t the case, we have almost 260 people on the mailing list and are looking forward to another regional Ruby Conference in the spring.
• we have a bad meeting night/time/place— if this is the case, please let me know what would be better.
• the local rubyists don’t want to be involved in a users group—I just don’t get this at all. It seems like there are a lot of ruby users in the area who know about the group, but won’t join the mailing list or participate in meetings. To me, local Ruby Brigades are just about the best resource you can find.

I’d really like this to be more than just a rant. Please (especially if you’re in URUG, the UtahValley.rb, or a rubyist in Utah County) let me know what you think, I want to make the UtahValley.rb as successful as it can be.