A Little Bit Of Merb In Los Angeles

Last night, I gave a short presentation on Ezra Z's cool Ruby web development framework Merb at the Los Angeles Web Developer Meetup. Microsoft was kind enough to provide space at their new downtown offices, and even buy pizza. Can you say "(munch munch) Silver (crunch) light (munch) launch (gulp) budget"?

When I started my presentation, I asked the room how many people were using Ruby on Rails. Almost everyone in the place raised their hand. Nice! My talk was a brief review of what Merb is, and some of the similarities and differences with Rails. The crowd was very attentive, and there were some good followup questions asked afterward.

Anyone who is interested in the slides from my presentation, they are available here.

There were also presentations by Ari Lerner about Ruby metaprogramming, and Ben Sandofsky on the Seaside web framework. I especially liked the example that Ben used to illustrate continuations.

Lastly was Woody Pewitt, the Microsoftie tasked with demoing Silverlight. It was funny how long it took their poor projector to recover when he plugged in his Vista notebook to show his demo, given that every other presenter was using a Mac. Woody was a good sport about it, and there really is a lot of interest in Silverlight right now, so I saw a number of people talking to him after the demo.

Anyhow, a good time was had by all, and I am looking forward to the next one. Here in L.A. we have a thriving little tech scene of our own, albeit not as huge as the bay. But don't count us out!