Summary of the Northern NJ November MySQL Meetup

November’s MySQL Meetup was fun, having two new members attend: Jen and Mor. Pete also made it to the meetup, and the four of us talked about:

• popular modern web application development frameworks like Rails
• outsourcing software construction off-shore and why ISO9000, CMMI 5 and Waterfall may not be a good fit for rapid web product development
• the approach of agile development methodologies like Extreme Programming (XP)
• a pragmatic view of “Web 2.0” and what it means
• volunteerism through the Taproot Foundation
• pictographical repreresentation of relative measures of qualitative data (i.e., Consumer Reports “blobs” and Harvey Balls)
• jQuery UI, a set of themable widgets and interactions layered on top of jQuery, that simplifies building rich web user interfaces

As convenient as it is to meet at Panera Bread as meetup attendees can get themselves food and drinks easily, I’m somewhat disappointed with its management’s inability to manage the reservations for their private room in back. I really do want to start digging deeper into MySQL and try to get speakers to present to the group, and the unpredictable availability of the meeting room makes this frustrating.

Amy Kearns suggested that I call the local public libraries about hosting the meetup in their space. Apparently many now have free wi-fi and some may even have a projector we can use. Certainly, the price is right (free!) and the benefits of having a dependable reservation and possibly a projector, in my mind, outweighs the convenience of food and beverages at Panera.

So, for December’s meetup, I’d like to experiment by having the meetup at a public library. The currently scheduled date for the meetup is December 5th, the first Wednesday of the month. How many people think they can make that date? Of those who think they can, where are you travelling from? I’d like to pick a library that is centrally located for the majority of the people who plan to attend.

Please RSVP for the December meetup and in the “comment?” box, indicate if you have a preferred library where you’d like the meetup to be held–especially indicate if you’re already a patron of that library. Once I get some responses, I’ll start making calls and travel to some of these libraries to see which would work best for us.

I look forward to seeing you in December!

Tags: New Jersey, MySQL, Meetup