Category: Conferences

  • RailsConf ’07 wrap up

    Portland is rapidly fading into the distance as I fly back towards Raleigh. I’ve enjoyed the past six days immensely. The Ruby/Rails community continues to surprise me with its passion, dedication, and downright uber-geekiness. The highlight of the conference for me was the time spent between talks and during meals, sharing ideas and experiences with other developers. I’m totally worn out now, but I’m already looking forward to next year’s Conf.

    Not everything was peachy keen, though. There are several things that bothered me about the Conf this year…

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  • Let the Conf begin

    I just arrived in Portland a few hours ago for RailsConf ’07. I’m looking forward to attending the tutorial sessions tomorrow, not to mention watching presentations by fellow Rails geeks on Friday and Saturday. My own talk on homesteading and Teascript will be given on Saturday at 10:45 AM for those who are interested. Hope to see you there!

  • Creating service apps with Rails at tonight’s Ruby meetup

    This is another brief reminder that I’ll be giving a preview of my RailsConf talk at tonight’s Ruby meetup. The meetup starts at 7 PM at Red Hat headquarters. Hope to see you there!

  • Preview my RailsConf talk at this month’s Ruby meetup

    For those who live in the RTP area, I’ll be giving a preview of my RailsConf talk at the Raleigh-area Ruby Brigade meetup on April 17th. We meet at Red Hat headquarters on NCSU’s Centennial Campus at 7:00 PM. I’ll be talking about Teascript, homesteading, and building niche web apps that generate passive income. The talk is pretty solid, but I’ll still be asking for feedback from the group on what can be added or improved. See you there!

  • RubyConf in the southeast

    The Ruby community in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina has been growing by leaps and bounds lately, in large part due to the fantastic job Nathaniel Talbott has been doing with the local Ruby Brigade. Another sign of the growing interest in Ruby and Rails in the area is the just-announced Ruby Hoedown, a RubyConf of sorts that’s being hosted by the Brigade in the Raleigh area on August 10th and 11th. Details are sketchy, but you can register on the site to receive more information as it becomes available. And to all you aspiring speakers, now is the time to start thinking about what you’d like to present at the conference!

  • Teascript goes live

    TeascriptI’m proud to announce that Teascript went live early last week. It’s been a long several months since originally conceiving the idea, building the app, beta testing, and deploying but now it’s finally ready for prime time.

    Teascript is a Rails application that makes it easy to design and build professional high school transcripts. It’s mainly targeted towards home school parents and students, however, I’ve received interest from several public and private schools who are looking for a transcript generation package they can install locally so the potential for this product seems huge.

    For those interested in how Teascript was deployed, the application runs on Apache 2.2 with mod_proxy_balancer and a cluster of Mongrels. I’m using a VPS provided by Slicehost. This setup has been rock solid so far.

    My talk at RailsConf this year will focus on the development of Teascript: how the target niche was chosen, how the application was marketed, and so on. My goal is to demonstrate how the principles outlined in 37 Signals’ book Getting Real and the homesteading concepts put forth by Nathaniel Talbott at last year’s RailsConf were combined to produce a web product that is self-maintaining, sustainable, and capable of generating passive income.

    So please, check out Teascript and let me know what you think.

  • RailsConf registration is open

    RailsConf registration is open. Time to scramble! From what I understand one-third of the seats are already taken. I’ll be speaking at the conference this year. Should be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. See you there.

  • RubyConf 2006: Day 3

    The last day of RubyConf is now almost over. It was a seriously great conference. As I mentioned previously, I’ve never been to a RubyConf before so I didn’t know what to expect. I’m glad I went. It was great hanging out with some seriously smart people. Several of the presentations went clear over my head. Several were quite entertaining. Most were incredibly intriguing. The Google Summer of Code talks were all excellent. Nice job, guys. It’s great hearing about what other folks are working on. Not only does it make me want to dig into their code, it also makes me want to keep hacking on my own projects. David, Chad, and Rich, thanks so much for coordinating this. It was a blast.

    Oh, and before I forget, yes, I do have more pics. Actually, MANY more pics. But they’ll have to wait. I’m in Lousville, it’s late, I’m tired, and I’m on vacation. If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll post these once I get back to Raleigh. And I don’t want any questions about why I’m not using Flickr and tagging them, by the way. This is the way I like doing it, and just like Matz is the benevolent dictator of Ruby, I am the benevolent dictator of my blog. Well, maybe not dictator. King, maybe. President. CEO.

  • RubyConf 2006: Day 2

    The second day of RubyConf 2006 dawned with snow on the ground. This isn’t unusual for Denver in late October, but it’s special to me since snow is a much rarer element in North Carolina, even in mid-January. The talks have been fascinating so far. Some have been more relevant to me than others, of course. Nathaniel gave his talk a couple of hours ago, drawing parallels between the way Ruby was built and the way businesses (such as Terralien) can/should be built.

    Matz answered questions from the audience last night. Here’s a pic:

    RubyConf 2006 Matz

    Here’s another pic showing what the crowd looked like last night:

    RubyConf 2006 Crowd

    Due to where I was sitting, this reflects about 75% of the room. In case you were wondering, yes, the hotel is swarming with geeks. I’ll have another update and more pics coming tomorrow, hopefully.

  • Off to RubyConf 2006

    I’m off to RubyConf 2006 tomorrow. I used to live in Colorado so I’m looking forward to returning to the area and exploring some old haunts. I’m also looking forward to hanging out with other Ruby geeks and hear Nathaniel’s talk again (he gave it at last night’s Ruby meetup). This will be my first RubyConf. I’m psyched.