Belfast Rails Supper Club

I was recently invited to join some other senior Ruby folk for a dinner in Belfast.

I love Ruby, and I love dinners, win-win!

The Belfast Rails Super club was organised by Jade White, she has put on several over the last while.

I haven’t attended networking events in years, in fact I haven’t been to a conference or meet up in a very long time. Interestingly, some of the folk I spoke to at the Supper Club were in the same boat. So, why did we go?

I can only speak for myself, but there were a few reasons;

• it is invite only, and it is nice to be invited to things, I’m unsure if it was my LinkedIn profile or our web presence, but good to get found
• I knew the numbers would be limited, so I wasn’t going to have to navigate meeting dozens of new people
• A free dinner in the Ivy! I’m of the age now were cold, cheap pizza being picked over by lots of people doesn’t really cut it
• I run a Ruby consultancy, I probably should stop writing code and start doing business things from time to time

I went into it with no real expectations, or any agenda. We were given the attendee list ahead of time and I was pleased to see there was a mixture of folk I knew, folk I had only spoken with on calls, and people I’d never met.

The evening was incredibly casual, people came, sat, ordered food, and we just talked. Most of the talk was around Ruby, and development generally, but there was no fixed agenda and no forced networking. At two points some people were encouraged to move seats, just so conversations could spread.

I left with a full belly, and lots of good feeling about our little industry.

The only thing I didn’t like about the evening, which I’m sure you will notice from the above picture. Everyone bar Jade was a white man. I think anything we can do to improve this would be good for the community and industry.

If you’re reading this because Jade has reached out and you did some searching to find out more, I say go for it. An evening is only as good as the company, but my experience has always shown that Ruby people are generally good people. At the very least you will get to meet Jade, who is good people!