Here are Micah (left) and Doug at the front desk of the belly of the beast. It was a treat to eat pizza on Bill Gates’ dime.

The event was 45 minutes of socializing, an hour of 4 presentations, then 45 minutes of socializing and shop talk.

Ron Evans talked about MERB, a way of speeding up resource intensive Ruby applications running on Mongrel. This pricked our ears because speed and scalability is still a big concern with Ruby on Rails.

Woody Pewitt (above) gave the requisite Microsoft presentation. I expected a presentation on VisualStudio or something more “developery”, but instead he talked about Silverlight. It wouldn’t be a Microsoft demo without a product falling over; Woody had to login to a Silverlight demo site via Passport, but Passport wouldn’t cooperate. That aside, Woody ran a tight demo and is smart and friendly.

Woody and his boss (I can’t recall his name) were great guys, and hey, free pizza, though they definitely fit the profile of “product evangelists”. I asked Woody’s boss the following question: “How does Microsoft plan to reach out to young web developers building the next big thing when the cost of the Microsoft development stack presents a signifigant hurdle.” The answer was along the lines of “We’ll offer VisualStudio Express” (i.e. crippleware). Hmm. I’m sure the Microsoft stack is the best product for developing most Windows desktop software, but Microsoft is mostly irrelevant at the leading edge of web development. It’s terrible to lose that leading edge because the young people building hot stuff today will start in the free and open source world and they’ll tend to stay there.

If you’re looking for a day job or startup project I’d recommend these types of Meetups. During open floor announcements people talked about their projects and the type of developers they need. Casual events like this - instead of big junket style conferences - are a great filter because just showing up on your own time signals that you’re a passionate developer or tech employer.

A couple of days ago I posted about deleting my Yahoo account. I wasn’t able to delete it because the Yahoo delete account form is broken. Five days and many emails to customer service later it’s still broken, and I have yet to hear from customer service.

Thanks Yahoo.

A while back we accidentally broke our delete user form. However, when someone emailed to complain I was horrified and apologetic, and we addressed the issue right away. Everybody makes mistakes, but if you treat the customer right when something goes wrong they can actually end up with a better opinion of you.