Power to the Tech Fringe

Today I was working at my local coffee shop1. I notice a guy near me with a large “Python Powered” sticker on his laptop. I wandered over, said “hi” and asked if he got to use Python daily basis.

He replied, “Yes. I have my own company so I get to use what ever technology I like.” Nice.

We ended up having a short discussion about the similarities and differences of Python and Ruby, my language of choice these days. Some what surprisingly, for me at least, was that he found the tendency to omit parenthesis in Ruby code one of the most unsettling things about reading Ruby. That is one of the bits of syntactic sugar I like best in Ruby. Now that I have had it pointed out to me I can see his point of view, though. I suppose it is all what you are use to.

I was just really happy to meet another person on the tech fringe. I really need a super cool “tech fringe” sticker for my laptop so that I too can announce to the world – or at least all the geeks nearby – I am out on the fringes of technology, where the fun is.


  1. Which, thankfully, has recently decide to provide real free wifi access rather that the “we are going to disable your connection, and thereby totally hose up your “VPN” connection, every hour”. It was a misguided attempt to force the people using tables to make a purchase regularly but mostly it was just annoying. Since they have changed to just normal unsecured wifi I can now work there again.

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