We're Here · 1165 days ago by Deirdre Saoirse Moen
In 2002, BayCon’s registration system outgrew its old registration database. A project was formed, dubbed “WeaselWare”—named after the registration folks, who call themselves “weasels” (many of whom used to be gofers, but that’s another story).
Several meetings were held, then the project lay fallow until 2005, when Deirdre (who’d been head of programming the last couple of years and had developed her own database for same) said, “Hey, what about that WeaselWare?”
And so meetings were convened, a schema finalized (really!)—incorporating Deirdre’s programming schema and Michael’s earlier take on a registration schema—and technology was discussed.
Though some technologies were “too hot” or “too cold,” the team found one that was “just right”: Ruby on Rails. It offered the technical folks a chance to learn a new technology, but one that was stable enough to have produced working web applications.
Databases were also discussed. The prior BayCon programs had used Access or MySQL (depending on which part you’re talking about). However, with one Postgresql person and a DB2 person on the team, Postgres seemed the more natural choice.
And so it shall be written.
