Describe Your Perfect Conference: Win Ruby Hoedown Tickets!
Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown, the "Ruby conference for the South" enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008 (yes, in a week's time!). Speakers include David Black, Chris Wanstrath, Giles Bowkett, Robert Dempsey, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, and late registration is $199. If you fancy a last-minute trip to what should be a great sophomore Ruby event, register now!. Huntsville isn't a crazy distance from Birmingham, Atlanta, or Nashville, so it shouldn't be too hard to attend if you're already in that corner of the country.
Describe Your Vision of the Perfect Ruby Conference..
Hoedown organizer Jeremy McAnally has also decided to give away 3 free tickets to the hoedown, so what better than a contest? To enter, describe your vision of the "perfect" Ruby / Rails or general technology conference. What would be there.. bars, circus tricks, hardcore programming sessions, casinos.. it's up to you. Be as crazy and unrealistic as you want! If you want a chance at the tickets, make sure to leave your e-mail in the relevant field and three people will be chosen at random. If you want to describe your ideal conference but DON'T want the Hoedown tickets, please mention that in your comment someplace.
(As an aside, consider filling out Hampton Catlin's Ruby survey if you haven't already. The results could prove very interesting - they'll be reported here on Ruby Inside once they're released.)
August 2, 2008 at 7:26 am
I think the ideal ruby conference has a registration fee of under $100.
It is partially structured, and partially an unconference with someone structuring voluntary presentations/groups/etc.
Other learning/hacking stuff should go later into the evening, perhaps accompanied by some drinks, but not just pure networking.
Railsconf 2007 was great b/c twitter had the "with friends" feature to read what everyone was tweeting w/o having to explicitly follow anyone. Some sort of ad-hoc website with this goal in mind would be a great benefit, as it would greatly help impromptu organization of activities, etc.
A great conference does not need the big names. There are so many amazingly bright people who don't seek fame and who would give great talks in an unconference format.
Ruby is open source, why can't the conference be?
August 18, 2008 at 2:46 pm
That's easy. Recreate RubyFringe.