Denver Rails Studio Miscellaneous Notes
Just a few scattershooting notes from the Studio, that I didn’t include in my previous post.
The consensus development platform in the class seemed to be Mac OS X using the Textmate editor and using MySQL as the underlying database. I believe this matches that of the core Rails team. I noticed few Windows folks and the few that I did notice seemed to have a few problems. I had none on my "preferred" platform.
As far as demographics go, we have 3 women out of our close to 50 attendees. All attendees were caucasian. At least, I think so. I was somewhat surprised to see no Asian Indian presence at all. My organization at work is dominated by Asian Indians, so I always feel like that’s representative of the development community. Perhaps not. One additional note, the mean age was probably between 32 and 35, but I have no empirical evidence to support that.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give props to my buddy Mike. After making it to my hotel, my every transportation need was taken care of. That includes an extraordinarily kind trip back to the airport which began at 6:15am on a Sunday. As someone who values sleep, I consider that a profound demonstration of friendship.
Over and above the rides, it was just fun to spend time with an old friend. Or shall I say a seasoned friend from several years ago. Its amazing how you can go 7-8 years without spending significant time with someone and you begin again as if no time had passed.
And finally, I had an instance of cry-laugh on the last day. You know what that is, right? A funny image popped into my head and I tried to describe it probably five different times. But before I could get more than one or two words out, I would start laughing. And finally, my eyes started to tear up. Its funny to watch someone go through this and Mike even started laughing without knowing what I was even laughing about. Those moments are priceless. Unfortunately, I had the giggles the rest of the day and that’s not necessarily good when you sit in the second row of a class.