Books for URUG

I’ve been kind of lax about doing anything to help with URUG of late, and I’m starting to feel guilty about it. Fortunately, O’Reilly and their User Group Program made it easy to do something to put off the guilt for another day.

While I was on vacation, two books showed up in my mailbox: Ruby By Example and Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications. I’m more aware of the first (I was the technical reviewer), but Amazon reviewers seem to like the second one too.

The first two URUG members to contact me (and who are willing to write a review to post on our mailing list and/or the google group’s web page) are welcome to them. Just two small points for the not-so-small print—you’ll need to arrange to pick the book up and one book to a URUGer.

November MountainWest RubyCamp

As I’ve told a number of people, I’m trying to ramp down a bit on my involvement with the Ruby community. It’s not because I don’t love ya’ll, it’s just that I have other things that are becoming more important to me. Last Saturday (Nov 17th) was one of the last major events I’ll be involved in setting up, the MountainWest RubyCamp.

The RubyCamp went really well. We had about 20 people show up for 4 hours of Ruby discussion and random geekery. There were five different sessions, with a couple of prepared presentations and some good group discussions. I guess the best measure of its success was that the attendees want to do it again. MountainWest Ruby doesn’t want to let anyone down, so it looks like there will be another RubyCamp in January. Depending on the dates I’ll try to make it there.

If you’re interested in getting involved, you can see the discussion that’s swirling around it over at URUG’s Google Groups site

Good luck to the organizers. I’m sure you’ll have a great time and come up with a great activity.

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.