Just back from the Limerick OpenCoffeeClub meetup in the Absolute Hotel. Had a great time, met loadsa cool folks, got away with a nifty TouristR t-shirt and saw the work of a marketing team who have not been to Limerick recently:
All in the same day!
We hung around in the bar initially as people trickled in. Patrick and I got chatting to some of the other early attendees. Met lots of fellow EI-haters (always fun!) and also spent lots of time with the TouristR crowd. Conor, Jan and Juanita are making a really cool site. They also have a mascot for their site called TR who’s reminiscent of the reddit alien and changes for every country. Lovable little feller.
After a while we went into the Brainbox room, and talked about Auctomatic and our experiences in the valley. It was cool giving the chat to all the Limerick OCC attendees, but the awesome thing was Conn O’Muineachain streamed it live to Ustream.tv (link).
Once or twice people posted questions for us on the live Ustream chat. I could feel the head inflating!
We also got to chat about Smalltalk, Seaside, and how incredible they are for building web applications. Hopefully we may have sparked some interest in the subject. Who knows, maybe Limerick might evolve into the first big Seaside hub - three more converts and Limerick will have the largest concentration of seaside developers in the world!
Patrick managed to make it through the whole chat without hating on Rails too much. You could say Auctomatic has a love-hate relationship with Rails - I love it, Patrick hates it. I think he suffered some deep emotional trauma from an RDBMS in his earlier years and still hasn’t gotten over it. I like Rails for being able to write my code in TextMate instead of a VM (and not having to end lines with semicolons like certain other languages who shall remain nameless). As Harj said: “I want to be able to type rails foo and make it seem like I’ve done lots of work”.
Afterwards, we hung out in the cafe. It was cool to be able to drink smoothies talk to lots of people who I’d previously only known from their twitters!
In other news, I’ve just gotten my provisional license so hopefully I’ll be able to drive to the next Limerick OCC meeting in two weeks time!
August 9, 2007 at 6:15 pm
John and Patrick thank you both for helping to make today’s OpenCoffee Limerick a remarkable event. And fair play to you for taking on the task of presenting on what was your first time at the meeting. Looking forward to meeting you both again at further OpenCoffees, Barcamps and PaddysValley etc. Keep up the great work with Auctomatic.
August 9, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Thanks James for having us! Meeting up with everyone was great fun, will definitely be going to future ones.
August 9, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Yeah, I think you guys rocked the OpenCoffee network and we’ll see what that means before the end of the month when dozens of other OpenCoffee followers cop on to the video and audio podcasts that are spinning out of the Limerick session today.
August 9, 2007 at 9:59 pm
John - thank you and Patrick for hanging out with us today. It was very enjoyable and inspiring!
August 10, 2007 at 4:06 am
John,
It was a very interesting talk. Well done.
Walter
August 10, 2007 at 9:01 am
Really enjoyed the talk via ustream. And thanks for answering my Q on YCombinator! Its difficult to tease the hype from the reality at this distance until you’ve heard directly from someone with the experience. It sound like exceptional value. Same goes for the advantages of locating in the valley. Hugely valuable talk guys.
August 14, 2008 at 3:26 am
I’ll admit that I am not a fan of blogs. I find them ego-centric and arogant. I am thoroughly impressed with the lack of substance with respect to this blog specifically. There are hundread/thousands of Americans who are doing great things and you talk about coffee, etc.
I would have never have found this site unless I had ‘googled’ my own name - and I am embarassed and disasppointed.
Good luck to you. I just hope you make more of your life than what I see here. My confusion and, to be honest, disappointment, is we should all live ‘good lives’ in absentia / in obscurity / in silence UNLESS we have something that can benefit mankind.