Heroku at a2div

Last night was the third a2div meeting. Majd Taby spoke about SproutCore at the inaugural meeting in September, and I spoke about CommonJS in October. November’s meeting, which was to be about Google’s Closure library, was canceled because of a confluence of factors… Three JS talks in a row led Trek Glowacki to declare that

so far a2

has turned out to be “A2 Javascript Lovefest”

While I certainly like JavaScript, that wasn’t intentional. We have to run with what people want to hear and are willing to talk about. Luckily for us, Trek himself was prepared to do something about it and gave a great talk last night about Heroku.

Trek had a demo ready to go, involving getting the open source code for RubyFlow running and customized. He had a neat way of doing the demo without resorting to live coding: he had the demo code in a git repository with separate branches for each step of the demo. It worked quite well and Heroku looks awesome. Video of the demo is available online.

In the loosely structured part of the meeting that followed, we had bits of discussion about a few different things, including a quick demo of Node.js by Majd. We also talked about what topics we’d like to hear more about in future meetings. Here’s the list that came up:

• Comparison of NoSQL engines
• Node.js or other Comet serving technologies
• The Microsoft stack for web development (Jay Harris offered to talk on this topic)
• Something involving designers + programmers (maybe even a “basic principles of design” intro to help us avoid creating designs with misaligned bits and eye bleed inducing colors)

The January meeting will be at its usual time and place (January 28th, 7PM, SRT Solutions). Topic to be decided.

Thanks to Trek for a great meeting at the spiffy Workantile Exchange!