Following the lead of Daniel and Lee, and outright stealing the concept and content of Lee’s blog post (he tagged me so it’s sort of ok,) I’ve decided to finally take 10 minutes to create a conference plan for RailsConf 2007.

This year was a damn sight easier to choose which talks to attend, despite the horrendous fact that there seem to be up to 5 talks running parallel to each other in some cases. The reason for said ease in choosing is due to the fact that, well, most of the talks just don’t look incredibly interesting to me (read: waste of money!)...

So today was the final day of RubyConf 2006, and I have to say, I was really eager to see Streamlined: A Framework for Data-centric Web Applications by Justin Gehtland, YARV: on Rails? by Koichi SASADA, and You got Ruby in my CLR! by John Lam. I think it was because I was so eager, that I somehow ended up sleeping in and missed the first 2 talks completely. Well, I did actually catch the last 2 questions posed to Matz and Koichi, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to see any of the content.

I suppose it’s all well and good, because after the YARV talk Chad Fowler ran his random raffle script through YARV, and it was fast enough that I was drooling. I hate to think of the effects the full presentation would’ve had on me....

Ok, so now that I’ve returned home, I’ll post the second half of today that I simply didn’t have time to do earlier.

So after the lightening talks came Web 2.0 Beyond the Browser by Rich Kilmer. Rich stated that this talk was added last minute to replace Jim Weirich as he wasn’t able to attend. Despite the short timeframe Rich had to prepare for his talk, he did an outstanding job detailing some of the more interesting aspects of his company’s product – the name of which I can’t remember. Most of the slides were pretty diagrams or bulleted lists that showed a pretty generic overview of the architecture of the app, with some heavy explanations from Rich to flesh them out a bit more. At the end of his talk he did a quick demo of the application and it did look like a pretty nice platform to make myself a bit of cash off of as soon as they release an api. While I did enjoy this talk a lot, I really don’t remember too much about the specifics, as I was nearing sleep or was just deep in thought or something. I really wish I could’ve paid more attention, as I was pretty interested by what they were doing. All I can really remember is that their original idea was to put a mini desktop onto a jump drive for some reason, and that the application had a flash ui. Either way, it sounded pretty smooth during the talk....

So it’s once again dinner break and day 2 of RubyConf 2006 is drawing nearer to a close. Today, the dinner break is a brisk 1 and a half hours, and then there will be a Keynote by Matz. Because of the shorter timeframe, and the need for food, I’ll try and make this quick.

I arrived at RubyConf around 8:46 and quickly found a seat with a plateful of cheese danishes from the continental breakfast bar....

So I’ve just arrived home from the roundtable discussion with Matz, where everyone lined up to ask them the nerdiest questions they could think of so that they didn’t embarrass themselves in a room full of other dungeon masters.

I showed up at around 7:20, and after a brief 10 minutes the night began. Everything was kicked off with a short quizzing of the audience with books being awarded as prizes. Quickly going off on a short tangent before I continue – earlier in the day, when the books were raffled off, they couldn’t give away AWDWR2, because everyone in attendence already owned it. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it was pretty funny. Anyway, many decent questions were asked that fell into the category of “Oh man, I should know this, but if I raise my hand I’ll probably get it wrong!” Because of this, I didn’t win a book. :(...

Well, today was the first day of RubyConf 2006, and I’d been looking forward to it since RailsConf 2006 ended. Before RailsConf ever started, I made a comment to some friends that I would do my best to blog about the talks that I attend. Unfortunately, I didn’t (and still don’t) have a laptop so that I could ‘live blog’ the presentations I went to as they were happening (in other words cheat and simply type the talk word for word rather than getting the chance to form an opinion.) Because of this I resorted to taking a series of notes that I had plans to compile into some sort of article once I got back to Colorado, as I was also stuck in Chicago for 3 days without computer access.

As a result, I did what any sufficiently lazy programmer would do – nothing. To this day I still have my little RailsConf tablet of notes sitting next to this very desk, but have not taken the time to write anything. One of the main reasons for this is that after so many years of typing day in and day out, my handwriting is painfully slow and atrocious at the same time. Basically my notes are bulleted 3 word reminders of things during each talk, that I had intended to use to refresh my memory....