Boston, NY, Raleigh

I've confirmed a December trip to the US East Coast. In Boston, I'm attending a product management seminar put on by Pragmatic Marketing, meeting up with a few Smalltalkers from the area, and planning to pop in on the Boston Ruby group's monthly meeting if I can squeeze it in.

On Thursday, December 10, it looks like I'll be giving a presentation at the NYC Smalltalk users group—Charles was kind enough to try to schedule something around my timetable. Details are not quite confirmed; I'll try to remember to post an update here but keep an eye on their site if you're interested. I'm planning to talk a bit about the techniques and tools we use to ensure Seaside portability across the various Smalltalk dialects but we'll see where the conversation wanders. I'm also planning to visit with friends, enjoy the pre-Christmas season in New York, and maybe do some shopping.

Finally, I'm making my way down to visit the VA Smalltalk team in Raleigh, North Carolina. John and I are planning to put our heads together on a couple of issues and I think I'll be doing a Seaside tutorial for some of the engineers while I'm there.

I'm looking forward to a productive, if exhausting, trip. Drop me a line if you're in one of these areas and want to meet up.

Seaside at Amsterdam.rb

I'm just back from the monthly meeting of the Amsterdam Ruby User Group at De Bekeerde Suster in Amsterdam. The cheeseburger was delicious, though I was slightly offended when the guy who brought the food said, "Let me guess... you want ketchup?". It's not like I'd even said a word; how could he have decided I was north american? :)

We talked about their plans for the RubyEnRails conference coming up on October 30 and shared some of our experiences from ESUG conferences. There was quite a bit of discussion around how to encourage programmers to give lightning talks. I also took a few minutes to give an overview of Seaside. Everyone there was quite interested in Smalltalk and the level of awareness was already quite high. We had some interesting discussions of the language's history as well as its benefits and limitations. In the end that made up a good part of the evening.

Thanks for the warm welcome.