Rails Guys Like to Party
Acts_as_conference was held in Orlando, FL on February 8th and 9th. Hosted by Rails For All, the conference brought all the regional rails developers together (and some out of towners!) for two days of talk, drink, and general merriment.
So I wish I could say more about the conference in general, but unfortunately I missed several of the talks because I slept in was so busy working. I was there for the always delightful Dan Benjamin’s talk about keeping things simple, and the value of design, and the superbowl (?). A non-technical talk about how important designers are? It was music to my ears.
After the first day of the conference Bradley Taylor of Rails Machine got me to do something I avoided at all costs during college; I went to the Orlando Ale House. I pretty much hate bars, but it turned out to be an awesome evening. Bradley gave out some awesome prizes; I won the “cyber-punk” novel Spook Country by William Golding. I don’t know what this “cyber-punk” genre is supposed to entail, but literally a dozen people came up to me at the event and swore that it was brilliant. In addition to new reading material, the night offered up a lot of great conversation and excellent spinach dip. I got to meet a lot of people who I’ve known and admired for some time, like Desi McAdams ofDevchix (note: Desi was pretty much the only other female at this event), author and CTO of Hashrocket Obie Fernandez, and bad-ass developer Jessie Newland. Of course all my old buddies were there, like Gregg and Jason. (How many times in a night can you hear “Hey, it’s DJ Ango!” before it starts to feel ridiculous?)
East Coast, Represent
I think the entire technical community here in Orlando was grateful to Rails For All for hosting a tech conference out here on the east coast (and south of the Mason-Dixon!) Could Florida be the new hot spot for conferences in the future? We’ve got BarCamps and FOWA’s already, who knows, maybe An Event Apart is next?