Last night, I met with a few people from around the GTA for the first ever RailsNightWaterloo. We met at Ceasars Martini on University in Waterloo. The food sucked; the people were much better.

We recieved a quick demo of the power of rails (similar to the Creating a weblog in 15 minutes), and then broke off into smaller groups and discussions. There was supposed to be a few more presentations but we really didnt have time because of all the schmoozing. It would have been nice to have a few more presentations from some of the Rails guru’s as I was hoping we might see and example of routing (one of the next things I need to do for my dscomics test project I am working on). Regardless, for a first meeting, I think it went pretty well.

I am hoping that the meetings continue. Toronto has had them for a while, and they seem to be pretty popular. Next time though, I am hoping we can find a bit better venue.

One of the people I met last night was Paul Dowman, the Director of Technology for a new startup called GigPark. It is a community-based web application that hopes to connect people services which have been recommended by their friends. Instead of hunting down all your friends individually looking for a recommendation for say a contractor, you can use this webapp to find out which contractors your friends have recommended.

They mentioned that they are currently hiring, and are using Ruby on Rails exclusivly, and are using EC2 from Amazon. These new Amazon web services are definitely the way to go for startups who are looking for power and flexibility while they grow.

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