Meetup.com costs money?

I'm not sure why I'm surprised, I suppose they have to make money somehow.

I was thinking about creating an Amazon Web Services group in Vancouver. It turns out it costs around $15/month. I don't mind footing the bill, but I want to make sure there is interest first.

If you're interested in starting a Vancouver AWS meetup group, let me know. I know there are a few others around here already using the tech.

Ruby Talk Last Night

I was at a Ruby talk last night. It was done by Scott Patten and it covered using S3 with Ruby (which is why I was there :)).

It's the first time I've talked with people outside my office that are using AWS, which was cool. It's interesting to see people at different levels of familiarity with AWS. The first stage is "wow, I can totally use this for backing up my data! It's so cheap." The second stage is "I can use this for hosting my images, js and css." Then people rethink their apps and come up with all sorts of uses. That's what I like to hear about.

I was actually impressed by the Ruby part of the demo. There are a lot of nice bits in there that make developing web platforms easy. I'm probably going to pick up a Ruby book and get a little more familiar with the language.

I did notice that the S3 bindings for Ruby don't let you update metadata about an object without re-uploading the object, which is a little odd. I suppose it has to do with the object metaphor they picked, but you'd think they'd be able to use etags to save some bandwidth.