Thursday night, and all day Friday and Saturday, were the first RubyRX event, and we had a great time. Topics ranged from Erlang to Active Record to Sinatra. Speakers ranged from Chad Fowler to Stuart Halloway to Neal Ford.
You can see a sampling of photos on Flickr on my RubyRX flickr set. I especially like Chad Fowler's "new" look.
I used my favorite phone streaming video app, qik.com, to record the lightning talks. You can find Part One and Part Two on their website.
I originally had three tracks scheduled and had to drop to two. A number of attendees weren't happy about that, and told me. However, on Friday, as the sessions unfolded, everyone came back and told me that two sessions was awesome. Every session had one Ruby flavored talk and one non-Ruby talk. (The non-Ruby talks were either another language, like Clojure or Erlang, or a soft skill.) On Saturday people kept coming up to me and telling me how much they loved the conference, how great it was, and they were definitely coming to the next ones. That feedback really makes all the work worthwhile.
The surprise hit of the conference was the functional language talks. Some people raved about Clojure (and complained about Erlang), while others raved about Erlang (and complained about Clojure!), nearly everyone was interested in learning about one of the functional languages on display. Kevin Smith and Stuart Halloway did a great job.
We've already reserved space for the next RubyRX. It'll be in Washington, DC on September 4th and 5th. I've already started collecting speakers for what promises to be an even better event!
