History

pdxruby has been a gathering place for local technology and open source culture enthusiasts for over ten years. Much has happened over these years and members of the group have started many important projects, groups and events that have become the foundations of our present-day Portland tech community. pdxruby isn’t merely a user group, but an open source culture incubator.

Visits

Many luminaries and core contributors of major Ruby projects have visited pdxruby:

• “Matz” (MATSUMOTO Yukihiro), creator of Ruby and author of MRI
• “ko1” (SASADA Koichi), author of YARV, which became Ruby 1.9
• Charles Nutter and Ola Bini of JRuby
• Brian Ford, co-author of Rubinius, author of RubySpec
• “DHH” (David Heinemeier Hansson), creator of Ruby on Rails
• John Lam, author of Iron Ruby
• Monty Williams and authors of MagLev
• “_why”, a unicorn of Halcyon Days
• Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki

Timeline

Major events in the history of pdxruby:

• 2002/08 - Started pdxruby. First meeting at McMenamins Cedar Hills in Beaverton. Attendence: 6. [Phil Tomson, etc]
• 2003 - Moved meetings to SE Portland locations like Lucky Lab and FreeGeek.
• 2005/04/13 - Lucas Carlson gives the first Rails talk at a joint meeting of pdxruby and Portland Perl Mongers, ~50 people showed up.
• 2005/08/03 - Had first FOSCON, a free Ruby-themed event for OSCON attendees. Visited by Matz, _why, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Jim Weirich. Listen to Why the Lucky Stiff and the Thirsty Cups, live at FOSCON 2005.
• 2005/09 - Started the “catherder” Rails app to run pdxruby.org and publish the group’s meetings and members. [Robby Russell, John Labovitz, Lennon Day-Reynolds, Caleb Phillips; later Eric Wilhelm, Ben Bleything, Thomas Lockney, etc]
• 2005/10 - Visited by Derek Sivers of cdbaby and Jeremy Kemper of the Ruby on Rails team.
• 2006/02 - Launched the “catherder” on Planet Argon’s shared hosting.
• 2006/07 - Started DorkbotPDX user group, people doing strange things with electricity. [Thomas Lockney]
• 2006/07/26 - Had “FOSCON II: Ruby Rodeo”, with presentations by Jim Weirich, Amy Hoy, and others.
• 2007/05 - Igal Koshevoy gives his first presentation, “Scaling Rails”. About 65 people attended at pdxruby and BarCamp, many of whom were new to the group and began to participate regularly.
• 2007/05 - Rails Conf 2007, the idea of MagLev in Avi Bryant’s keynote, and the awesome RejectConf run by Ryan Davis at FreeGeek.
• 2007/06 - Moved mailing list to current location at Google Groups.
• 2007/07/24 - Had “FOSCON III” event at Holocene.
• 2007/08 - The final “meeting that didn’t happen” due to lack of organization, which often happened because someone had to volunteer to give a talk and rally consensus among other members for a meeting to happen.
• 2007/09 - Igal Koshevoy began organizing and running meetings. Instituted the now-familiar regular monthly meetings, meeting format, and emphasis on participation. These changes quickly increased attendance by 3-5x, attracted many new members, and significantly boosted interaction among members.
• 2007/11 - Moved meetings from Free Geek to CubeSpace, a new and awesome co-working space run by the delightful Eva Schweber, David Kominsky and their fanatically helpful team. CubeSpace was a geek utopia that helped launch many groups, events and friendships.
• 2007/11 - Started pdxfunc user group, Portland Functional Programming Study Group. [Phil Tomson, Thomas Lockney, Igal Koshevoy, etc]
• 2007/12 - Started Legion of Tech non-profit for growing Portland tech community through educational, not-for-profit events and providing resources for event organizers. The group put on many important events like BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland and such that bring in crowds of 250 to 600. [Audrey Eschright, etc]
• 2008/01 - Started Calagator project to make it easy to find and share local tech events through a community-editable calendar. Began running agile code sprints that helped us quickly build the application, taught Ruby on Rails programming to many novices, and involved 40+ code contributors. [Audrey Eschright, Reid Beels, Igal Koshevoy, Joe Cohen, etc]
• 2008/02 - Visited by “Matz” (MATSUMOTO Yukihiro), creator of Ruby and original author of MRI.
• 2008/05 - RailsConf and Avi Bryant’s “rabbit in the hat” demo of MagLev. Visited by Charles Nutter for JRuby hackathon.
• 2008/06 - Started WhereCampPDX conference, a free, volunteer-created unconference for anyone interested in geography and technology. These yearly events typically bring in about 200 people. [Audrey Eschright, Reid Beels, Anselm Hook; later Igal Koshevoy, etc]
• 2008/07 - Had final FOSCON at CubeSpace, which drew a crowd of ~125. Visited by John Lam of Iron Ruby, Ola Bini of JRuby, and others. Had a bunch of cool talks and an awesome live coding contest where teams built a web app to the same set of requirements using Ruby on Rails, GemStone/S Smalltalk Seaside, PHP Drupal, and PHP Symfony.
• 2008/09 - Started Westside Proggers user group, a polyglot programmers group in Beaverton. [Phil Tomson]
• 2008/10 - OSCON and RailsConf announce they’re leaving Portland. Undaunted, we begin planning the Open Source Bridge conference. Open Source Bridge is the spiritual successor to the earlier FOSCON. These yearly events typically bring in 400-500 people. [Audrey Eschright, Reid Beels, Igal Koshevoy; later Christie Koehler, etc]
• 2008/11 - Started OpenConferenceWare, an open source platform for managing conference-like events, for Open Source Bridge and others. Began running code sprints that involved many code contributors and taught Ruby on Rails programming to many in the area. [Igal Koshevoy, Reid Beels, David Cato, etc]
• 2009/01 - Started pdxjs user group, the Portland JavaScript Admirers. [Jesse Hallett, Scott Becker]
• 2009/06 - Had first Open Source Bridge conference.
• 2009/08 - Rewrote most of “catherder” app in about a day using modern libraries.
• 2009/08 - Moved pdxruby.org off Planet Argon hosting.
• 2009/09 - CubeSpace went out of business, which was a huge blow because this was a home-away-from-home for many and a central meeting place for many in the Portland tech community. Many groups went under because they couldn’t find a new venue. After months of searching, found a new venue for pdxruby at Robert Half.
• 2009/09 - Markus Roberts began doing his world-famous Ruby hangman puzzles.
• 2009/11 - Started pdxscala user group. [Thomas Lockney]
• 2010/05 - Rubinius ships 1.0!
• 2010/06 - Had second Open Source Bridge conference.
• 2010/08 - Started pdxdevops user group. [Igal Koshevoy]
• 2010/09 - Started ePDX / Citizenry project, an open source community directory of groups, people, projects and organizations. [Reid Beels, Igal Koshevoy]
• 2010/10 - Started Stumptown Syndicate to “support technology education and community-building through events, space and resource coordination, and other activities”, replacing defunct Legion of Tech. The group runs or supports Open Source Bridge, BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland, WhereCampPDX and others. [Christie Koehler, Audrey Eschright, Reid Beels, etc]
• 2011/06 - Had third Open Source Bridge conference.
• 2011/07 - Started Ruby Beginners Meetups. [Sam Livingston-Gray, Jesse Cooke, Matthew Boeh, Chuck Vose, etc]
• 2011/07 - Had Cascadia Ruby Conference in Seattle. [Ben Bleything]
• 2011/08 - Had first PDX Tech Workshops “Beginning Programming for Women, Ruby Edition” training with about 40 students. [Christie Koehler, Audrey Eschright, Reid Beels, Igal Koshevoy, etc]
• 2011/09 - Visited by “ko1” (SASADA Koichi), creator of YARV which has since become Ruby 1.9.
• 2011/summer - Konstantin Haase and Tim Felgentreff spend the summer in Portland. Konstantin interned at Engine Yard Portland and worked on Rubinius, Puma and the HPI benchmarking tool. Tim interned at GemStone and worked on MagLev.
• 2011/10 - MagLev 1.0 ships on Halloween
• 2012/04 - Moved to a new meeting venue. Meetings began to regularly attract 50-70 people, which was more than Robert Half’s conference room had seats for and it would get very hot because the building’s air conditioner was turned off in the evenings. Moved to the much larger and better ventilated Crowd Compass office.
• 2012/06 - Had fourth Open Source Bridge conference.
• 2012/08 - Had Cascadia Ruby Conference in Seattle again! [Ben Bleything]
• 2012/08 - pdxruby.org replaced by a wiki to make it easier for folks to contribute content, and retire old functionality that we’d replaced with Calagator and ePDX. Ye olde “catherder” app was retired almost exactly 7 years after work began on it.
• 2012/08 - 10 year anniversary!
• 2013/01 - Kirsten Comandich began organizing and running meetings.
• 2013/04 - Igal Koshevoy RIP. Memorial site: Friends of Igal
• 2013/06 - Had fifth Open Source Bridge conference.
• 2013/08 - Kevin Steigerwald designs a new pdxruby logo.
• 2013/11 - Moved to a new meeting venue, New Relic. Meetings have now outgrown all places we’ve met before, regularly attracting 70-100 people.
• 2014/06 - Had sixth Open Source Bridge conference.
• 2015/06 - Had seventh Open Source Bridge conference.
• 2015/08 - 13th year anniversary party! Aaron Patterson and Godfrey Chan speak.
• 2016/09 - Lauren Voswinkel starts us off with code retreat-style “Game of Life” exercises!
• …and soon much more!