Jesse says...

First of all, props again go to Ben Edwards for getting this thing up and running. The event was amazing, and had a great turnout. I saw a lot of great sessions.

The best discussion I was involved in emerged out of the session by Charles Gimon from the Minneapolis Public Library. His session was about Disintermediation — how information technology affects knowledge workers such as librarians and journalists. In the days before Google, a scarcity of access to information made those jobs critical, as they were the researchers and distribution channel for information. Now, workers in that space need to either look for new work, or redefine their job to become filterers of information, rather than gatekeepers. It was a good talk with lots of participants and a strong focus — exactly how a good un-conference session should work.

Overheard at MinneBar

Software is not technical. It’s social.

You can’t be late if the name of your company is Clockwork.

How can you ask us factual questions when we don’t have access to Google?

What size shirt? Extra large. Oh, you mean Programmer’s Small.

My pics from MinneBar

MinneBar pics on Flickr

I really hope that this passes — what a huge win that would be both for the public and for open standards:

Bill Introduced in Minnesota to Require Use of “Open Data Formats”

And remember: Open standards make the web go ’round.

Introducing MinneBar…

MinnēBar is based on BarCamp and is an ad-hoc open-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. All attendees must either give a demo, host a discussion, actively participate in a session, or help with one.

We were in dire need of a good, geek-oriented technology conference here — I am all over this. Congrats and good work to Ben Edwards at AltText for getting the ball rolling on this.

I hope to see many of you Saturday, May 6th!

We got snow today. A lot of snow. Over 10 inches, I hear. So, naturally, we decided to take advantage of this and take Ali out in it. What a glorious time :) She’s a little snow bunny, and it’s so rewarding to watch her having so much fun.

Okay — I’ve fulfilled my duty as a Minnesotan father. Winter can be done now.

Yes, I’m a fricken geek. We already know this. For fun and pleasure I enjoy talking to computers and trying to convince them to do things. Lately I’ve been looking into Ruby, a very clean programming language that’s getting a lot of hype in the web dev community for it’s “killer app”, Ruby on Rails. Since Tanya has been doing a lot of yelling at me lately, trying to prompt me to get out of the house and interact with people more, I decided to go to the local Ruby Users Group meeting last Tuesday.

I have to say, I was quite surprised at the number of people there. There were probably close to twenty people, but I guess part of that is due to the good PR Ruby has been getting. About half of the people were really new to Ruby, some of them hadn’t even installed it yet. The other half seemed to consist of Java developers, and system and database admins.

There were two lectures/presentations. The first one was on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby in Java (similar to Jython, a project I was following for a while and even did a logo for). The second was about Watir, the Web Application Testing In Ruby framework. Very, very cool, I must say. Unfortunately, since it only currently works with IE on Windows, it doesn’t help me much. But, if you’re a Windows monkey and you work on web sites, this is definitely something to look into.

So, needless to say, I think I’ll try to hit the next one, the last Tuesday of February. They’re going to be building a site for a non-profit in the Twin Cities, which is really awesome… maybe I’ll try to contribute. I’m also thinking about making a presentation of my own about building Jabber bots with Ruby. What better way to learn something than force yourself to give a presentation on it. :)

UPDATE: The new Ruby Users of Minnesota site is at Ruby.MN