acts_as_conference is now history

It’s Saturday night here in Orlando, FL and I just finished listening to Obie Fernandez give the final keynote of a busy two days of talks about Ruby and Ruby on Rails development. The conference was very good, it was hard to believe it was the first time the Rails for All folks put in a conference like this one. The event was sold out with about 150 developers from all over the U.S. I think a conference of this size is really nice where you can sit down with speakers, mingle and get to know many of the attendees.

Meeting New People

I met a lot of new people from all over the country including some people I only knew from blogs or podcasts.

• Greg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy Podcast
• Jason from the Web 2.0 Show
• Obie Fernandez
• Ezra Zygmuntowicz
• Dan Benjamin

Great Speakers

There were many great speakers at this event, none that I did not enjoy. It was really good to hear the latest about Merb from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Rubinius from Evan Phoenix and JRuby from Charles Nutter. The presentation from Charles was probably my favorite technical talk. It could be because I learned a lot about JRuby, not knowing too much about it before today. I plan on trying out JRuby along with Netbeans. Sun was a great sponsor as well, having people manning the booth both days. I also enjoyed the talk from Charles Brian Quinn about how to approach training people. This was a talk from real experience and makes training more of a possibility for me to offer down the road. There was also a great talk on working with teams from Luke Fracl, who I was not familiar with prior to his talk. Luke presents very well and his style gives you confidence he knows his stuff. Two of my favorite talks were the two keynotes we had this weekend, the first from Dan Benjamin who talked about building and selling Cork’d. Dan talked about practical views of creating a business, running it, and all around suggestions for running your company. Obie Fernandez was the second keynote speaker, who is one of my favorite authors from his book to his blog. His presentation on practical aspects of being the best developer you can was truly inspiring advice that got me thinking about my own approach to my development work.

Finally

Well, it was a great time! I am glad I spent the time to come down to warm Orlando from my home in CT, where it has been snowing for days. We had a great party sponsored by Rails Machine at the local ale pub and they gang really had their share of ale. The best part was the conversations we had and the friends made. I look forward to seeing some of these same speakers at RailsConf 2008 in Portland, OR May 29 – June 1, 2008. The conference was well organized and I thank all those involved in putting it on.? There was talk about having this event again next year. ? I certainly hope so as I plan on attending.