soledad penadés

As usual, I write about great events with one day of delay (as I did with Jeff Barr's web services' speech past May). And the great event, in this case, was Pizza On Rails!

After two failed attempts, it was the first POR that I managed to attend, and it was really funny, although I almost failed to attend this one: I had written down the address of the venue, but I hadn't looked at the map - and it was a bit tricky. It was Leicester Square 1, but (I don't know why) most of the buildings didn't show the number in their door. So I went in circles by Leicester Square, until I realized it was "officially" in that street but the entrance was in another one. Obviously it was thanks to a very ordered and british queue in front of the entrance, plus a couple of "Pizza On Rails" posters.

I didn't know anyone at the queue but then a guy, Jason, which had been at past London's Ruby Users Group meeting appeared and said "Hello! I remember you! You let me go the wrong way on past LRUG meeting! I got lost in the building...". And I felt terribly embarrased, hehe. But well, there we went and up! It was the 6th floor so we had a very nice view of Central London (which was specially impressive, when a massive romantic storm appeared, with strong thunders and the lightnings drawing lines all across the sky, following the fireworks around Southwark).

Thanks to the sponsors (Cominded), beer was free (um, as in beer!), as was the pizza. There were vast amounts of both, and we had very nice conversations with a Dutch guy and another mate there (can't remember the names, sorry!)... After a while, it was extremely surprising/funny to find out that Gasman was there as well! Demoscene joins Rails! Wooh! I went to say hi! and ask him if he was preparing something for Sundown, and he is! So pay attention to Sundown06 releases :)

Some time later, a very nice portuguese couple appeared. She had a very good level of spanish! (I can't help but loving the spanish when spoken by portuguese people). They were considering about moving to Barcelona, and we had an interesting chat about salaries in Spain and Portugal and London. London's figures just looked so impressive! And then suddenly someone asked me if I was a developer. I was kind of ... uh? which question is it? as the most common question there was "how much Rails do you know?", and it was assumed that you were a developer when asking it. But he was curious about how many women there were actually developers. I explained him my personal theories about the lack of female developers -which basically are summarised in one: until recently, it was uncool to know about computers or machines, but now it is normal and desirable, so this attitude helps a lot towards assuming that it's a profession like any other one-.

Then he revealed himself as being Martin, one of last.fm's developers! Ohhhhh! I couldn't believe it, I mean, it's a service I use almost daily and last thing I could expect from a Rails meeting is to find someone from last.fm (since, as far as I know, they just use Java and PHP). Even more, he came accompanied by two more mates, Julian and Hannah, from the design department. Impressive, I was face to face with the people which creates the interface we use daily :) And I presume that it must be very nice to work at last.fm if all of the staff is like them.

I finally joined them when they left the party (it was 21h already, if I remember correctly), and went with them to the tube station. So we said bye and I went lonely but happy on the south bound Piccadilly Line - as Hannah said: ... but does anybody live in Victoria? Hehe, yes... me! So all in all, a very cool party, I ended almost without voice (and had a very sore throat this morning, arggh), but it was worth it. I'd like to thank the organisers and sponsors for this cool event.