Brain Lint

I attended my first Boston Ruby User’s group meeting earlier tonight. I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly, but I was surprised how many people attended (in the neighborhood of a hundred I would guess).
Both of the speakers were quite interesting.

• David Black gave an interesting talk on the way Ruby implements inheritance with a particular emphasis on giving objects that “spring from” the same class different behaviors without defining additional classes.
  Learned a lot from this exercise in meta programming because I’ve really only dabbled in Ruby so far.
• Zed Shaw had a really energetic, engaging and entertaining presentation touching on his http server, Mongrel, its competitors, evildoers and anti-social behavior on the internet and how he aims to address that with his Utu project

The sessions were video taped so they’ll apparently be up on Google video sometime soon. You don’t really have to know or care about ruby to enjoy and learn from Zed’s talk.

One of the great things about living somewhere like the Boston area is that people I’ve heard of before show up at things like this – attendees of the meeting tonight included Martin Fowler and John Resig (wrote JQuery), along with many other folks much smarter than me.