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I attended the Pune Rails meetup, hosted by my company Thoughtworks, this evening. Although I’ve had a brief (well, not-so-brief) encounter with Rails over the past 9 months (and for more than an year now with Ruby), I’m not that much of a Rails person. It’s an exciting framework, alright. But I’m not that much of a web person. I had a few observations about the event, which go as follows.

• Rails has made it really easy for people to start developing database-backed web-apps quickly. Unfortunately, it appeared that not many people knew too much about Ruby the language.
• The Rails meetup did not have much to offer to new comers. It ended up being more of a practitioner’s meetup, who discussed their apps and experiences. Nothing wrong about it, but my friend – who comes from the .Net world – didn’t get any taste of what Rails is about. I had hoped that attending this session would have made him a convert, given that he is a web developer. I was left alone at the end of it all, explaining to him why Rails is that cool. Not that I did a great job there…
• The sessions lacked technical depth. I guess that could be primarily because people are reluctant to speak.  “Someone else will be speaking, I believe” – must have been the general belief! ;-( Maybe, it’s also because such meetups are far and few, so it is hard to set an agenda or topics.
• Probably, many of the experienced Rails people just avoided turning up. Atleast, hardly any of the good Rails guys I know of personally turned up. As was rightly noted during the meetup by Anthony Hsiao, even though Pune has (probably) the highest number of Rails developers in India, Pune-ites aren’t particularly known to be as active when it comes to organizing such technical gatherings. No prizes for guessing that RubyConf India 2010 isn’t happening in Pune!

A quick note – ThinkDRY presented their Blank Application which they’ve open-sourced. Cheers to them!

On the whole, it could have been much better.