John

Thanks for your glowing comments. I definitely take responsibility for your frustrations Saturday. There was a lot more work that could have been done up front had I had a little more foresight Friday night. I also should have had someone else test the environment Friday night to help me make sure everything was working. As Nate said, hindsight is 20/20 (or is that 20/30?)

I understand your frustrations with Bundler, but let me assure you, I’ve tried using the built-in config.gem command and it’s been nothing but trouble for me. It doesn’t resolve dependencies correctly, which ends up with some gems you have to install manually. Bundler is obviously a new tool and we’re all still learning it, but the advantages it provides outweigh the trouble it gave us getting started. And it will keep getting better no doubt!

Anyway, thanks so much for your dedication this past weekend. I certainly did not expect you to stick with us all weekend, especially after the issues you had Saturday, but you were there the whole time. The work you did was great and I really enjoyed working with you; I hope we get the opportunity to work together again on a project that is a little more organized with more pairing.

It doesn’t matter how busy, how far behind and how many people kept asking you questions and getting you off task, you kept plugging way, helped everyone and didn’t get cranky.

I have a weakness with that. When I get pulled away from writing code a lot, I tend to get cranky about it, which helps no one.

I completely agree that it would have been nice to have some of these issues solved beforehand. The issue there is 1) We didn’t know who all was truly committed, and 2) We don’t know everyone’s environment. Maybe we could have had a quick meeting sometime before the weekend, but that’s tough to do when you are competing with busy schedules.

I think we had a handful of people new to Ruby/Rails, and that’s why I wish there could have been more pairing involved. With that being said, I couldn’t have been happier with the results of the weekend. The dev issues aside, I think it was great to meet and learn more about local developers. We knew going into this that we couldn’t complete this 100% – which is why we wanted to have more fun with it.

Your insight, and your ability to execute the calendar page was awesome. I think it is definitely the hardest page of the site to get right, and was very pleased that you hit the ground running with it. You know, because I love calendar views on the web and all ha.

Anyway – some very good points here – but I just wanted to say a great big thanks. It was a privilege getting to work next to you the entire weekend. Hope we can do that more often.