From: "Rob ." <rob.02004@...>
Date: 2005-03-02T20:13:00+09:00
Subject: Re: London (UK) Ruby meeting, February 28

Here are some brief notes from the Feb 2005 London Ruby Group meeting.
We had 11 people in attendance, including four Robert's, which was a
little confusing. We did a round table each speaking about our Ruby
connections, interspersed and followed by general discussion and quite
a few pints. All agreed to get onto the ruby-talk IRC channel if they
weren't already. If you want to find out about plans for the next
London meeting subscribe to the Ruby London list:
http://browser.org/mailman/listinfo/rubylondon

Below is a summary of some points of interest from the meeting, please
add or correct if necessary. The lists are probably quite incomplete.
:)

Ruby is being used in:
 - UK Parliament House of Commons - for publishing
 - Communications agency in the advertising market
 - New startup in stealth-mode
 - Various opensource/academic projects

Some topics talked about (very incomplete list):
 - Ruby being used in commercial projects
 - scalability of Rails/Active Record
 - test-first programming - requires discipline but worth it!
 - speed of performance vs. speed of development and maintenance (will
yarv be there to improve the former?)
 - telecommuting being socially depressing
 - sometimes easier to write solution in Ruby than download Ruby tool
 - Ruby community is helpful to all - term "egoless programmers" was mentioned

Some things being written in Ruby:
 - PhD research work (GIS)
 - Miscellaneous scripting
 - News aggregator
 - Topic map serialization api
 - World data visualization service
 - HTTP cache gem

Things being done for Ruby:
 - Providing jobs for Ruby prog'rs (thanks Sean and Ben!)
 - Ruby London mailing list server
 - Ruby plugin for jEdit

Ruby frameworks/tools in use:
 - Rails/Active Record
 - Needle
 - Instiki

Languages used in day job:
 - Ruby
 - Perl
 - Java
 - .Net/C#

Ruby editor survey approx. results (some people listed more than once):
 vi/vim - 4
 textmate - 2
 textedit/textpad - 2
 scite - 1
 emacs - 1
 jedit - 1 (Rob McKinnon is working on Ruby plugin)
 eclipse/rdt - 1 (Rob McGovern co-authored "Eclipse in Action" book)
 freeride - 1
 arachno - 1
 whatever's there - 1

Thanks to all who were there. A good night, hopefully followed by many
more in the coming months.