Montreal Tech Watch

I went yesterday to the first edition of Montreal On Rails, hosted at McGill university. This was a meetup for web developers using the Ruby on Rails framework, and was organized by Karabunga. Bilingualism was taken for granted, room was packed, lots of chit chat, lots of new heads and many entreprising souls.

Contrary to other reports you can find in other montreal rails blogs, I won’t go into technical details. I would only say that the speakers, Marc-André Cournoyer and Carl Mercier have setup the bar pretty high, and it would be difficult to make a better presentation, unless you present a newly developed gem or plugin.

As for me, I think Montreal On Rails is going to raise the profile of the framework in Montréal – and also create some friendly competitionemulation.

more pictures

One final note: I also noticed that there was there more guys than you can find at a university computer science class. By seeing the audience yesterday, I thought the proportion of women working in the web is not going to change anytime soon. And it struck me that every other girl I have been with in university is now working either in pure science or either in business-related areas, such as in Information Systems or as technology consultants, but never as a java/.net/sql developer. Why is that so? Do you think it should change?