Looking Back

The Ruby Hangout has been a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed talking to lots of great notable people and learning about all kinds of awesome projects.

My own life has been getting busier and busier. I’m the CTO of a growing startup, and my priorities have shifted sufficiently so that staying on top of a monthly meeting has gotten beyond me. Ultimately I think the future holds lots of great things for the Ruby Hangout but perhaps not as a monthly event.

Looking outside

The Ruby Hangout has been a wonderful vehicle to meet interesting people and share that with you. I’d love to talk to lots more people about Ruby and where we’re going with it. There are other interesting things going on out there in the world of development too though.

I started the DC Polyglot Programming Meetup and I’ve been really excited to learn about new things across the industry. I think cross-pollination is the only way to get the best ideas all the time, otherwise you get a serious echo-chamber.

The Ruby Rogues had an interesting talk with Dave Thomas recently. He said you should always be challenging your own status quo. He recommended for example to try programming without TDD. I love TDD, but when I write other languages I don’t use it as much. It led me to wonder what’s really important—-is the value in writing the tests or is the value in the confidence in our code that we get out of it? It’s just one example but it’s interesting, and it’s the kind of thinking I’ve opened myself to by considering how other people get things done.

The Future

The Ruby Hangout will continue, just more sporadically. Subscribe to our Google Plus page and you’ll always get alerts when we have a hangout, or follow us on twitter at @rubyhangout.

And always check out our past hangouts in the sidebar, they’re all lots of fun!

-Josh