However, we have an agreement, I just suck at writing stuff in that way.

You know, I’ve noticed this problem, because you’ll find many different books on a topic in one language. Computer Science algorithms for example, and game development for another. However, it is up to a good programmer to apply those techniques to the different languages.

Well, I think you could put my presentation in that group. I talked about automated testing (systems testing) at a WordPress WordCamp, whereas it could have been better focused at a general programming group.

However, in my experience with people speaking generally, you don’t really talk to developers when you do that. You need to give examples to affect the developers mind. If I had more time, I would have done more of that myself, but at least with my aptitude, I would understand better if the speaker was speaking to me directly in a language I understood, whether that be C, C++, Java, or PHP.

Not everyone has many languages on their belt, so it makes sense to me that speakers would geared towards a specific language crowd. It would be more efficient if there were a general development group that talked about extensions and extending languages (you can bet I’ll be down there, depending on the price and how far), because I’ll be more than interested to see how Python is extended in contrasted to PHP and would like to learn how .NET language runtimes are extended.

It is also my lack of experience in going to conventions that I don’t think it would work. However, with as many tech people in your area, I would say, you do it and see how many come. It could be a good social experiment to prove me wrong. Oh yeah, if it is a success, make sure to say, “Jacob Santos is an idiot, err, I mean he was wrong! We CAN have a general development group discussing problems.”

It’ll be like BarCamp, except one of the better ones.

To clarify what we were talking about, I was asked about what could the local (Utah) area do to create the same sort of features technology wise, that the Bay Area has in California. One suggestion was that many of the user groups (PHP, Python, Ruby, etc) have presentations and discussions on topics that have a much more wider appeal that to just the people using that specific language. As a result we often see groups that are smaller and have a difficult time growing.

Let me cite a few examples. Recent the Ruby group talked about nginx and the features (like the memcache module) it has and potential ways you could make use of that. This clearly has a much wider appeal than to just those people who are using Ruby. Another example is the PHP users group had someone speak on Ext JS, which can be used by lots of other folks besides the ones writing code in PHP.

The result that I’m seeing is that these groups often have presentations that have a wide interest, but they are done at groups that have a very narrow and specific group of people (only folks using Python for instance). It isn’t reasonable for me to try and make it to the 12 some odd different events that happen each month, I’ve got other demands on my time. What I was suggesting is a more general development group, that would be more likely to attract people because it wouldn’t be so tightly focused on just one language or development environment. The additional exposure would also be helpful to people, to see how other languages, frame works, applications and environments solve problems.