ORUG
Monday was my first time attending the Orlando Ruby Users Group. I saw some familiar faces from OJUG, including Mike, Dominic, and Gregg, who runs the show at ORUG. He gave a great recap of the meeting on the ORUG site. There were two presentations, one by Nathan Bibler about a Rails i18n plugin, and the other by Robert Depmsey on project management for really small (as in one person) development project management. He introduced us to Basecamp, a hosted service by 37signals to collaborate with end users, as well as FreshBooks which is hosted invoicing software.
One of the coolest things that was mentioned was hackfest. This is where a bunch of developers get together and hack out some software in a day. Think of it as a lan party, except that you get to code instead of frag. 
The last hackfest resulted in a Google maps mashup, even though no participants had ever done one before. The next one is on September 9th, and they will attempt to create the rails version of PHPbb.
I have to say that I’m impressed with the group so far. This is a true grassroots organization, and the attendees are very bright and enthusiastic. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to learn some more Ruby so that I can keep up with them!
