I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ to everyone who came to last night’s Western Mass. Developers’ meeting. Further, many thanks to those who helped out in one way or the other — especially Miles and Doug for running for the D’Angelos, Doug for bringing the ice and cooler, Joe and Lou and Greg and Brian and everyone else who helped to set up or tear down. I think everyone pitched in, which made it all work out pretty smoothly, I think.
FYI, we collected $170 last night. That covered all of our food expenses and then some — I think once I tally up everything, we’ll have a surplus of ~$40 (and we have a bunch of generic supplies that we can put to use in the future). Thank you very much to everyone who pitched in in this way, too. Hopefully we can keep that pot flowing.
Some highlights from the meeting, and random thoughts of mine, in no particular order:
- Doug gave what sounded like a rousing talk about the PHP templating system that he conjured up. It seemed like most of the group really enjoyed that.
- I generally don’t touch PHP, so I hung back and talked about entrepreneurship and software business models with Lou, Maria, Michael, and….darnit, I can’t recall the name of the other gentleman that joined us. Sorry, man, I can be bad with names at times. Keep coming to the meetings, and I’ll straighten out, I promise.
- In the second time slot, I instigated a discussion about the current state of rich client platforms, through the lens of some particular requirements that we have for current/future projects. That turned out to be pretty entertaining and productive, with a big chunk of time dedicated to people being impressed by the surface features of Titanium/Appcelerator. That may be a good topic for future blog posts if we end up really digging into it.
- Just about everyone was down on Adobe Flex/AIR as being very unpleasant from an end-user perspective (widgets not behaving as one would expect, etc). I unintentially sort ended up trashing on JavaFX — or more specifically, the current lack of an integration story between Swing and JavaFX, as well as the oddities of JavaFX script. In the clear light of day, I feel like I should probably give it a closer look, simply because of our established JVM codebase.
- There was widespread speculation that a “shadow group” got together at Panera, despite all of the chatter and announcements about the change in venue. Maybe next time (if there’s a next time here @ Snowtide), someone could swing by Panera and gather up those who aren’t as plugged-in to the group’s chatter.
- Gerard walked away with Managing Humans, graciously provided to us by Apress’ developer group book program.
- Will and I ended up holding on to the Terracotta book (also from Apress), though we promise to pass it on to Miles when we’re done!
It seemed like everyone had a good time and that most were pretty happy with the results compared to the usual Panera experience, but I’m clearly biased. One way or the other, shout out what you liked and didn’t like (either on the mailing list or in the comments below).
FWIW, I’m happy to have Snowtide continue hosting the group’s meetings if people enjoyed the result. If there’s a next time, get the shared conference room, and see how that works out.
Again, thanks to everyone who came!
Comments (5)
Mar 13, 2009
Anonymous says:
Chas, this sounds like it was a lot of fun. I wish I could have made it, but I s...Chas, this sounds like it was a lot of fun. I wish I could have made it, but I seem to be coming down with something at the moment. Looking forward to the next meeting..
– Shawn Fumo
Mar 13, 2009
Anonymous says:
And, don’t forget, thanks to Will, we all learned a fair and fun way to give awa...And, don’t forget, thanks to Will, we all learned a fair and fun way to give away stuff.
– Lou
Mar 13, 2009
Anonymous says:
Chas, thanks again for hosting. I enjoyed the new location, and I’m not just say...Chas, thanks again for hosting. I enjoyed the new location, and I’m not just saying that because it’s within walking distance of my house.
In other free-book news: for Doug’s sheer PHP gumption, on the spot I awarded him a PHP book — which he doesn’t need, but perhaps some intern or designer will!
I was also happy to pass on some quality books (and videos) related to Adobe Creative Suite products. The excess there was courtesy of my employer.
– Paul
Mar 13, 2009
Anonymous says:
I still haven’t figured out how to post to the list, but I’m glad you’ve got a b...I still haven’t figured out how to post to the list, but I’m glad you’ve got a blog page up about the meeting!
I enjoyed getting to see the Snowtide offices and REALLY liked the entrepreneurship discussion. It was really interesting learning about Lou and Chaz’s business models. I have a feeling I’ll be writing about them soon.
I’m hoping that this will grow into a more regular feature — I really miss having a group of entrepreneurs to talk to and bounce ideas off of.
I also liked reminiscing about the old days…
But I did feel bad about not being able to participate in the main sessions. Unfortunately, my tech skills are 15 years out of date.
By the way, I was super impressed with Chaz’s employee who did the on-the-spot random number generators. They were elegant, quick — and executed perfectly. If I had done this, I would have forgotten to start counting from zero, and would have made arithmetic mistakes in the actual calculations.
It’s wonderful to be around people who can use math.
I’ve missed that, being out in the non-tech world for so long.
– Maria
Mar 13, 2009
Anonymous says:
Oh, one more thing — when the three finalists for the PHP book put out their fir...Oh, one more thing — when the three finalists for the PHP book put out their firsts, for a minute I thought you guys were going to do rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock.
I would have liked to see a multi-player implementation of that.
– Maria
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