Last night, my wife and I headed over to Salem Beer Works after work to hang out with the Build Guild. This was our first time attending a networking event for the “web inclined”, as you might call them - a mix of web developers, designers, and pretty much anyone else involved or interested in the web side of technology.

And it was excellent. The event was put together by Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni, two self-professed Salem web geeks. I originally found out about the event through the North Shore Web Geeks meetup (who, according to Angelo, is their rival gang. He explained Build Guild is better because they have a better gang sign), and while I couldn’t make it to that, I eventually stumbled on a link for Build Guild.

I chatted with people in all sorts of positions, from someone who is forced to develop solely in IE6 for a state government website, to someone who works just in Ruby on Rails. They were all friendly, intelligent people, and besides the horrible lack of air conditioning at the Beer Works, we both had a great time.

Photo by Peter Wood