There have been a lot of aborted blog posts during the last month as I'm trying to leave the fluff to the other bloggers!

While I should have a substantial post this week containing real code, I do have an announcement. With the help of Brooke Kuhlmann, I have launched Not Just Ruby, a Colorado Springs Meetup group that starts with Ruby, and then includes pretty much all overlapping topics that might be relevant. The goal is to provide Rubyists, and Ruby-curious, a place to share information about Ruby and the other compatible technologies. Think Photoshop, agile methods, accounting, marketing, SEO, and business planning. All of these topics are interconnected, interesting in their own right, but either there aren't groups specific to them, or no one really wants to sit through 2 hours every month. By providing a broad canvas, people may indulge their different interests and learn about things that might be on their neglected to do list.

While Colorado Springs is an awesome place to live, the larger businesses are pretty much in either the Java or .Net camps. Ruby, and it's offspring Ruby on Rails, provides huge productivity gains and cost savings for small to medium projects. Larger projects are trickier, but no more so than Java or .Net. Building a strong and vibrant community is the best way to get the attention of businesses, and by including the parallel technologies, we can virally infiltrate the strongholds of Java and .Net.