Tonight was the third Bristol Ruby User Group meeting, but the first with room for laptops and a projector (thanks to petef for organising and The Watershed for giving us somewhere to meet for free!).

About ten people showed up and we took some time to settle in because lots of us hadn’t met before, we ranged from total novices to professional Ruby programmers (I sit very close to the bottom rung in that ladder!) and didn’t have any concrete plans on what we were going to be doing.

In the end we decided to set up a GitHub repo for any work we might do in other sessions (which you can see here) so spent some time getting that up and running for everyone and then naturally gravitated into two main groups: one getting Jekyll integrated so that we could have a website, and another doing some introductory Ruby work.

(I’m afraid to say that I’d gone beyond tired and into slightly manic which was alarming for me, let alone everyone else, so I worry slightly about the impression on others but hope I can ascribe it to the beer.)

It was good to hear Steve from Beef praising Sinatra, since I’ve written a couple of apps based on it the last few weeks and it seems like the perfect way of writing lightweight web applications in Ruby.

In conclusion, there is an Upcoming Group, a mailing list and of course the GitHub repository we set up and the associated website/blog! We meet on the third Thursday of every month so if you’re local and interested in programming, come along!