I’ve worked with Rails for 5 years, but since I live in Siberia it’s always pretty hard to find anyone like-minded in my area, except bears and php guys. So this year I wanted to attend to RailsConf badly, and luckily Chris said: sure, why not.
So for me, RailsConf was all about people. Meeting Railsists and Rubyists as I am, sharing experiences, talking about our projects and just bragging about day-to-day shit. It was a very inspiring and interesting experience. RailsConf talks and tutorials were a good bonus to all this :)
I really enjoyed the talks by Obie Fernandez, DHH and Chris Wanstrath. Too bad I missed the talk about Smalltalk and Ruby by Robert Martin.
We also attended New Relic’s customers party. Free food and drinks, you can’t ignore something like that :) New Relic seriously rocks.
Probably the most useful thing we did at RailsConf is talk to the Engine Yard guys. We solved many many problems from our current Beanstalk setup. Hopefully this will make our scaling pain go away soon and make Beanstalk faster. We are working really hard on this one.
And of course, Vegas itself is a super-crazy place to visit! Probably the craziest city in the world. Super amazing shows, lot’s and lot’s of fun and beautiful stuff to see.
We also visited NYC and Philadelphia during the trip. It was also very interesting. I liked Philadelphia very much. Calm and beautiful place to live. I plan to move there for a couple of months to try living the US way.
So, RailsConf 09 was a blast, I really enjoyed it and will definitely attend next year. I hope we will make some small Beanstalk users meet-up also :)
Don’t forget to check out some photos that I took at the conference.