cpjolicoeur (Craig Jolicoeur)
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About Me
I'm a web developer, originally from Massachusetts, but living in Rhode Island for the past 6 years.
Most recently I worked with a few different startups in the Boston, MA area as a senior Ruby on Rails developer.
Recent Content
Hey guys, seems like discussion has died down on the earlier Ruby thread about having Ruby Group meetings. I've been trying to get something setup and am hoping we can have the first meeting in October, but I need a bit of help.
As I've worked solely out of Boston the past 3 years, I haven't been involved in the RI tech scene and need a bit of help with choice of venue for the meeting.
Also, we'll need a few people to volunteer to give a short talk or presentation since I haven't been able to line a guest speaker up yet. The more volunteers the shorter everyone needs to talk. Maybe the first meeting can just be a simple "Drop your Pants" session where everyone gives a blitz talk on what projects they are currently working on??
Ideas? Comments? Suggestions?
Are there any Ruby on Rails shops in RI? Everyone I talk to in RI (especially recruiters) have literally never even heard of Ruby on Rails. Is RI so entrenched in Java and .NET technologies that there are no companies using Rails?
On another note, any kind of Ruby User group interest in Rhode Island. It's getting tiresome traveling to the Boston and MetroWest ruby groups up in MA all the time. Wondering if there is any interest in having a Rhode Island group
Are there any good tech recruiters in RI? I've been working with web startups in the Boston area for the past few years and would love to work in RI or southeastern MA, but I can't seem to find a single tech recruiter that does placement in RI.
Every single one is either a Boston or NY based recruiter firm. Are there simply no web jobs and startups in RI or are there simply no recruiters? I have a hard time believing its the former.
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Recent Comments
Interesting. I've worked with three different Rails startups with teams ranging in sizes from 2 - 7 and we've never really had issues with keeping things inline.
Do you think its a lack of proper communication thing or something else? Like not properly dividing out tasks among developers?
I created a Google Group so we can start more formal discussions instead of relying on multiple threads here on RI Nexus.
If you are interested, please join the google group and participate in the mailing list discussions.
http://groups.google.com/group/rirug
Sounds great. I know with the Boston.rb group recently, we've been working on expanding and developing a few gems and plugins during the hackfest meetups and its been great.
Any ideas on projects that we could start from scratch or libraries in use that we could expand upon?
Yeah, I figured things were slower due to the upcoming holiday and back to school season.
I'm not a drinker so I'm not familiar with Trinity. Do they have a meeting room that could be used to give talks/presentations or is it more an open-air discussion table type environment?
Hey Andrew,
It seems there are a few new users to git here in RI. I was just helping someone else out in another thread
http://rinexus.com/forum/general-discussion/anyone-using-git
I'd be glad to answer and questions you might have regarding git.
Yeah, very good point.
So keeping it Ruby specific seems like the way to go (but I wouldn't mind the Python guys popping up every now and then just to keep us in line!)
Not really sure. I guess it mostly still depends on interest from the community.
Also, I'm wondering if perhaps it shouldn't be more of an RI New Tech group instead of just Ruby centric. That way we'd have more interest and much more diverse crowd. The Python crowd, the hardware hacking crowd, the web designer crowd, etc... all have valuable stuff to contribute and I think we all could get something out of it. Plus it would give us a larger group of people to choose from.
Perhaps that isn't a good idea though and not having a specific enough scope would dilute interest? What are your thoughts? I've never really spearheaded a user group before so I'm not really sure.
As far as dates, I guess we need to figure out a few possible locations and then see what times/dates we can use the facilities to actually hold a meeting.
I went ahead and formed a RI RUG blog site just to preserve our potential "future assets".
http://rirug.wordpress.com/
I really hope we can get this started and create a decent user group here. And it really can be a tech group if there aren't that many Ruby enthusiasts in the state. I know I'm personally interested in many other programming languages than just Ruby as well hardware related tech projects.