Live report from the meetup (like a true geek)

**Update:** spelling, adding details, names, URLs.

Sitting at the Copenhagen meetup, like some kind of backchannel geek. Typing. (There were five wireless networks around me, so I didn’t need the password to the bar where we sit. Quite a nice location, a quiet, loungy upstairs. I guess this post will be updated more than once. Sorry for that, in advance.)

[Jesper](http://www.justaddwater.dk/)’s here. He said: “Our first 60 beers are on Our Kind Sponsor.”

Thomas introduces his interest in, and his work with, Rails. He’s Jesper’s colleague, and he began using Ruby on Rails around New Year’s in 2006. “We began mocking stuff up for customers using Rails.” One small-project customer said: “Drop that ASP track, and write it in Rails, it seems much cheaper.”

Personal reflection: We are finding out the magnitude of The problem of Taking Stuff Over (after the initial consultant who built the magic has left for other challenges). Meetups make it possible to reduce this problem.

Corporate challenge: Convince not the boss, but the customers.

Small-business challenge: Convince boss to change business.

One-man challenge: Create, and make a business of the creation?

Re: Prototype with Rails. _A pitch can be worked out over about 1000 man-hours._ Quite interesting data point. (Someone said: “Using Rails you’d be at Version 4.0 after 1000 hours.”)

[Casper Weibel](http://www.weibelmedia.dk/)’s here. His stint in London’s ending, and he’ll come home to Copenhagen. Praise of Rails, and his meeting with Rails.

Morten (who had come over from Aarhus), who were at the PragProg’s workshop. “We got to implement PragProg bookshop, selling _their books_.” [Laughs.]

(There was some amount of bashing one’s “home environment” for web development. People very consistently talk about trying to find alternatives to their current tools. “Re-tooling” said one guy.)

Jesper: “Instead of doing HTML mockups, I was able to do a working Rails app.” Note about the enormity of documentation to go with static HTML mockups.

Jakob Skjerning: “Trying to bash Rails, getting it to fall over, and as yet, it wins over ASP, even when running on a weaker machine.” Jakob’s been blogging about his research into moving an ASP 3.0 application to Rails.

(Now, a big fan started behind me. Fsck. People need to talk louder, more “bullet-point-like”. Pelle’s taking pictures. I wonder what he’s tagging them with?)

(Some guy I missed the name of, after Jakob S.): “PHP kind of sucked, and I have few customers to convince, so moving to Rails was swift.”

Next guy: “I live off of Java, but I like Rails.” And: “I can concentrate less on the framework, and using AJAX was just much less painful than in Java. And fun, even.” Praise of Webrick. Here to meet Rails folks.

Svante, from Fyn tells about his day job: “Maintenance of ASP 3.0.” And about “my Hobby Projects, which are not ASP.”

Rails has The Name-dropping Problem: “The customers ask ‘Why is no one else doing it?’ and you don’t have the Long List of Big Names to show them.” (said Jakob.)

“You can send loads of Word documents of screenshots before actually getting to the core of What This is About.” Using Rails to prototype is… just Faster.

Back channel is: irc.freenode.net and #railsmeetupcph. (Note: It had about 5 users.)

Guy with moustache (his name was Mads, and he works with Jesper): “Rails as a frontend, Action Web Service as talk-to-others.”

Lars of [Nordija](http://www.nordija.dk/): “[Watir](http://wtr.rubyforge.org/): that is how I found Ruby. Ain’t yet used Rails.” A sales guy. Pushes Rails inside his company, to the developers of his company.

[Pelle](http://www.stakeventures.com/): “Ruby, I’ve been using it a long while. My micro-conglomerate is paid by Java consulting. Perl still rocks, nice to hear. The stuff we used to do in ’95, it’s now done using Ruby and Rails. Thanks for doing the corporate pushing of Rails, Jesper & co.” Then he railed about Culture. Then about How To Work. He is bloody incisive.

Then we got onto the subject of Insurgency!

**Update:** Yes, here the live reporting was cut off, as [Peter got me to broadcast the meetup in Skype](http://ruk.ca/article/3741). He posted a screenshot to prove that he “was there.”

**SOME NUMBERS**: I asked for a show of hands about how the congregated people paid their bills:

* Java: 7
* .NET: 7
* PHP: 4 (Peter Rukavina raised his hand in the IRC, but I didn’t count that)
* Other: 2 (mainframe & Perl)

I guess I should not be surprised at this turnout of Java and dotnetters, but 3 other PHP folks?

Peter Brodersen was one of the other PHPers. “Is that the Peter at [Findvej.dk](http://findvej.dk/)?” asked Jakob. I think it was nice to hear the words “at Findvej.dk” – it sounds so established. [tags]events, rubyonrails, rails, copenhagen[/tags]