felix terkhorn data technology and web development

As part of my perennial networking push, I made the trek up to the Indianapolis Ruby Brigade meeting on Wednesday night. It was quite a drive from Bloomington to Carmel, but it was definitely worth it. Indy.rb is a great example of a group that combats the tradition of "Hoosier Brain Drain." I was delighted to have the opportunity to present to these capable and interested individuals. What's more, this was a solid gathering of bitheads -- it was clear from the other presentations that no one was out to hype technologies which didn't deserve the extra attention (the job of marketers) -- and it was also apparent that the people in the room didn't take themselves too seriously (the job of academics)! This is a group that is clearly interested in leveraging the latest open-source technologies in order to produce powerful tools in a short amount of time.

We had some great lightning talks on Wednesday night.

• Matt Gordon from Expected Behavior gave a really clever rundown of global and local Ruby news.
• Joel Meador gave some good information about Ruby tests and metaprogramming, but I had to smile and nod through part of it!
• David Jones detailed the brainspace-saving benefits of HAML and SASS: make your HTML and CSS look like haiku! I had looked into these before and was skeptical, but I was pleased to hear David report that he's used both without encountering many broken corner cases.
• And yes, Yours Truly presented some extremely fast-and-loose information on ActiveWarehouse library for Ruby (sadly, it's not well supported) along with some classic academic handwaving about Google's MapReduce algorithm. One could observe that warnings to avoid adding unnecessary structure when attempting to data mine large amounts of information are still fresh in my mind...

I will definitely make a point to swing by Indy.rb in April. Thanks all for a great meetup and for giving me a chance to climb onto my soapbox!