North Shore Web Geeks Meetup

The Port Tavern in Newburyport was jumpin' last night with the monthly North Shore Web Geeks meetup and some hockey game :-) on the big TV.  Thanks to the Port Tavern for handling the geekage in addition to the Bruins v. Canadiens playoff game and a power outage in part of the building.  Because the power outage affected the function room, we crowded into the space at the top of the stairs outside the function room  to hear Adam Darowski and Joe Oliviera talk about Sass.

Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets

Some folks did sit in the darkened area, with many jokes about running the Zippo Lighter app on everybody's iPhones and yelling "Freebird".  Real candles worked a bit better :-)

Candlepower

Speaking of geekage, I think this is the first time I've heard the phrase "Turing complete" since I was a compiler developer in the late Jurassic age of computing.  That warmed the cockles of my heart. I see a post about the difference between a markup language and a programming language in the future of this blog. :-) For that matter, why is my heart full of mollusks anyway? :-) Another blog post topic.

The crowd begins to gather.

The turnout was pretty good, around 25 people.  I saw many of the people I met last time, and met a few new ones. Also found out there's a Drupal meetup coming up in two weeks at the Port Tavern. I don't use Drupal, but it keeps coming up in so many opportunities, that I keep thinking I should add it to my repertoire. Remember the days when you could call yourself a webmaster when you knew HTML?

Pre-presentation Strategizing

Presenters Adam Darowski and Joe Oliviera

Adam and Joe did a great job of tag-teaming the presentation and covering all the important advantages of Sass for those of us still using plain old CSS.  The slides are up on slideshare.com, so I'm not going to summarize them here. Suffice it to say that Sass looks like a big improvement to this old CSS hack.

Mingling and networking and Bruins overtime victory over Montreal completed the night. (Yeah, techie geeks can care about hockey. I have a signed photo of Bobby Orr over my desk -- which may reveal a little about my age as well as working class origins :-)).