We’ve been busy this past few months, having been asked to present at both RubyConf 2008 in Orlando, and at Voices that Matter (aka Obieconf) in our home town of Boston.
Voices that Matter
The most recent conference was Voices that Matter, in good ol’ Beantown. This was one of the best conferences we’d been to, for a few different reasons.
Obie Fernandez chaired the conference, and did a great job of keeping it focused and dense. The talks were limited to 30 minutes each, and mostly dealt with practical business matters: how to run an agile ruby shop; what technologies are ready for wide-spread use; building strong teams; etc.
Some of the main themes included TATFT, pair programming, and maintaining a friendly and inviting Rails culture. We were also very surprised by the amount of thoughtbot love we encountered. We participated in two round table discussions, and presented both Agile in the Enterprise and Rails AntiPatterns, and we were mentioned in a handful of the other presentations. We can’t express how happy we are to know that people are getting real value from our tools and philosophies. You can download our talks here…
Chad and I were very pleased that the AntiPatterns talk (which was a sample from our upcoming Rails AntiPatterns book) got a 5-star rating across the board!
RubyConf 2008
We also presented at RubyConf on Coding For Failure: All you need to know for building rock solid applications.
I’m not sure what to say about RubyConf that hasn’t already been said. Except that I would be greatly disappointed, and take it as a personal insult to me, and everyone I love, if it’s not held in exactly the same location next year.
As alluded to, RubyConf featured the laziest of rivers, the most full RV rides, the dirtiest go-cart racing, and a water slide that was strangely difficult to climb up from the bottom to the top despite one’s personal interest in achieving such a feat.
Note to future conference organizers - if the talks could somehow be projected onto a screen that you could see from the hot tub you probably would not get any complaints.
