Limerick OpenCoffeeClub
Just back from the Limerick OpenCoffeeClub meetup in the Absolute Hotel. Had a great time, met loadsa cool folks, got away with a nifty TouristR t-shirt and saw the work of a marketing team who have not been to Limerick recently:
All in the same day!
We hung around in the bar initially as people trickled in. Patrick and I got chatting to some of the other early attendees. Met lots of fellow EI-haters (always fun!) and also spent lots of time with the TouristR crowd. Conor, Jan and Juanita are making a really cool site. They also have a mascot for their site called TR who’s reminiscent of the reddit alien and changes for every country. Lovable little feller.
After a while we went into the Brainbox room, and talked about Auctomatic and our experiences in the valley. It was cool giving the chat to all the Limerick OCC attendees, but the awesome thing was Conn O’Muineachain streamed it live to Ustream.tv (link).
Once or twice people posted questions for us on the live Ustream chat. I could feel the head inflating!
We also got to chat about Smalltalk, Seaside, and how incredible they are for building web applications. Hopefully we may have sparked some interest in the subject. Who knows, maybe Limerick might evolve into the first big Seaside hub - three more converts and Limerick will have the largest concentration of seaside developers in the world!
Patrick managed to make it through the whole chat without hating on Rails too much. You could say Auctomatic has a love-hate relationship with Rails - I love it, Patrick hates it. I think he suffered some deep emotional trauma from an RDBMS in his earlier years and still hasn’t gotten over it. I like Rails for being able to write my code in TextMate instead of a VM (and not having to end lines with semicolons like certain other languages who shall remain nameless). As Harj said: “I want to be able to type rails foo and make it seem like I’ve done lots of work”.
Afterwards, we hung out in the cafe. It was cool to be able to drink smoothies talk to lots of people who I’d previously only known from their twitters!
In other news, I’ve just gotten my provisional license so hopefully I’ll be able to drive to the next Limerick OCC meeting in two weeks time!