My Apologies To The New York City SIG Friday, July 20, 2007

This past Wednesday night Andy Glover and I were scheduled to co-present at The New York Java Special Interest Group. Andy was going to give a 90 minute session on Groovy and I was going to give a 90 minute session on Grails.

Wednesday turned out to be crazy day in New York. Weather made it difficult for air travelers to make their way in to JFK Airport. The huge steam pipe explosion that happened in mid-town Manhattan made it very difficult to drive in to Manhattan. The whole story is a very long one but the short of it is that Andy's flight was canceled and so was mine. We couldn't get a second flight booked for Andy but we were able to get one booked for me. Unfortunately mine was an indirect flight and the second leg was delayed numerous times and I finally got to JFK to find that because of the steam pipe explosion in the city, the trip from JFK to the meeting location was well over an hour and by the time I got into the city, there was no point. I think the meeting was scheduled to run until about 8:00 and I think I got into Manhattan shortly after 8:00.

I was really disappointed myself as I have never had the opportunity to work with Andy before this event and I was really looking forward to it but mostly I felt bad for all of the developers in New York who made it to the show only to find out that there were no speakers. The New York developer community is really enthusiastic about Groovy and Grails and the large audience that turned up to see the show represents that. I am sorry that they were left to look at an empty stage Wednesday night. I promise all of them that we were scrambling all day to work it out and each time we came up with a solution another problem came up, mostly related to shut downs at JFK. I hope that many of the folks who came out to the SIG meeting will make it to the NFJS show in Princeton New Jersey the weekend of August 10th. I will not be there myself but my friends Jason Rudolph, Scott Davis and Venkat Subramanium will all be there with Groovy and Grails sessions.

Again, I offer my apologies to everyone who came out to the show Wednesday evening and I hope that you will invite us again.