I’ve gotten back from RailsConf. I actually got back a few hours ago, but went to bed and couldn’t sleep (idea! ping! awake!). So, I thought I’d start writing up stuff whilst I thought of it…
The conference itself was pretty well organised by SkillsMatter and RubyCentral. There were a couple of minor hiccups which caused confusion—the main one being the rescheduling as some talks got a much stronger interest than expected, meaning that they had to be moved to larger rooms. Thankfully, there were helpful little orange elves to answer questions all over the place, so it wasn’t a big problem.
One slightly unfortunate behaviour was the shape of the venue: three tracks were on the lower ground floor; one was on the 2nd floor. So there was a lot of healthy exercise to get the Rails geeks going up and down stairs (the lift was too slow!) But the venue as a whole was very good. Extremely central —200 yards from Tottenham Court Road tube station.
The wireless was terrible. That seems to be standard for conferences unfortunately. It seemed that the DHCP server was handing out 24 hour leases, and then only 100 of them in the main hall, which was a real pain. At least it meant I concentrated on taking notes!
All the talks were recorded and should be up soon, hopefully! I really want to catch some of the ones that I missed. The best thing I can say about this conference is that I was incredibly torn between the choice tracks. They had a fantastic array of people and ideas.
Jabbering Giraffe 