Sunday, October 11, 2009

Organizing Boston Area Scala Enthusiasts


Photo by Pear Biter


I like the concept of a local user group. It serves multiple purposes. As I embarked on learning Scala recently I wanted to join a local Scala user group. To my surprise, there weren't any in Boston area. However, there were already such groups in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Boulder, just to name a few. I found it shameful.

After all, I thought, we are the 2nd ranked startup hub and overall one of the biggest software hubs in the U.S. Therefore, there have got to be local software professionals interested in all the new stuff. But then, even the local Groovy/Grails group got formed rather late (May 2009). I couldn't explain why Boston seems to lag when it comes to forming groups around latest technologies.

Instead of sitting in despair, I decided to take some initiative and see if it was just simply lack of interest or something else. I was happy to find out it was the latter. Turns out, there were couple of people thinking about starting the group for a while, but they needed that extra little push to actively start working on it. As a result, Paul Chiusano, Chris Herron  and I officially formed the group on October 1st, 2009. Ten days later we had 28 members - not bad at all. Even more exciting, I found out there are at least couple of local companies developing software in Scala, an encouraging sign.

So, if you're from the area and want to share your Scala enthusiasm with others, please join us.