My NH Ruby Presentation

Last night I had the floor at the monthly NH Ruby users group meeting. Thanks to Nick and the group for inviting me.

I apologize for being 1/2 hour late, it's a 2.5 hour drive from my house to Portsmouth NH, but with stopping for coffee and gas, and getting pulled over for speeding (oh $hit), it took more like 3 hours. And I left the house later than I'd planned because I decided to do a full backup of my pc at the last minute (I brought my iMac to the meeting since my 'desktop' is my 'laptop'; yeah, i know, sometimes I do things backwards).

When I got there, the conference room was pretty full, about 14 people, eating pizza and having a wonderful time, shouting, laughing, dancing half-nude on the conference table -- it's a good thing I got there in time to calm them down. (Very much just kidding, it was a pretty sedate room). I was expecting maybe half a dozen, so this was cool. Tim streamed the meeting over the net and said there were 14 other people watching at one point.

Of course, I forgot to bring a VGA adapter so we couldn't hook the iMac to the projector, but I did bring a memory stick with the presentations too (good thinking!) and I borrowed someone else's laptop for the projector.

I gave a presentation on several of the things I've been working on over the past year, namely,

• ReviewRamp
• Using Cucumber
• DynamicRecord

I've posted the presentations on slideshare , and embedded them below. Figuring this was a techie group, I didnt spend a whole lot of time on making the slides pretty. The material jumps right into the topics, with minimal introduction, rolling up our sleves and getting to it. I hope this didn't alienate some people in the group, but I figured in this setting, present substance over stuff that can be easily googled.

My talk prompted some discussion but not a whole lot. So either the group was completely mesmerized, overwhelmed, or asleep! By consensus, the meeting went to 9:30 rather than 9, making up my lost half hour, so that's a good sign. 

Afterwards a bunch of us went out for beers, and I headed back to north country around midnight, getting home in the wee hours and sleeping-in this morning.