Why you need to come to RailsConf EU
Posted by David August 01, 2006 @ 02:49 PM
Lars Pind is voicing his concerns over the lack of enthusiasm around RailsConf Europe. I can sympathize with the fears, but allow me to iterate why you need to be at RailsConf Europe.
Rails is not an American thing! It was created by a Dane, after all. The core team musters people from Canada, Germany, and Austria. The community itself involves people from literally all over the world. RailsConf Europe should be asserting that fact and allowing us to demonstrate that there’s a viable ecosystem outside of the US.
Okay, that was the moral call to action. Now what you get out of it. RailsConf Europe will feature a host of exclusive presentations that’s not just a rehash of the US conference. We have Kathy Sierra, the star of recently concluded OSCON, gracing us with her presence. We got Jim Weirich, one of the Ruby communities best speakers, the creator of Rake and Builder, coming even though he wasn’t at the US version.
Unlike the US version, we actually have Rails core members speaking besides yours truly. The honorable Jamis Buck, the king of Capistrano, wasn’t even at RailsConf US, but will be here. Thomas Fuchs, the czar of script.aculo.us, wasn’t at RailsConf US either, but will be here. All that on top of Marcel Molina, Dave Thomas, and myself delivering fresh speeches.
So in many ways, I see the European line-up being even stronger than the US one. That’s not to say its all a rosy dance. It’s considerably more expensive to do a conference in London than in the suburbs of Chicago, which means somewhat of a sticker shock. There’s currently less employment opportunities for Rails in Europe than in the US, so more people have to pay out of their own pocket.
But if you have the means, if you’re working professionally with Rails, you really should come. Let’s reverse the trend of US conferences bringing over an anemic, rehashed show. And let’s assert the fact that Rails is not an American invention or property. It’s a global play and a strong Europe should balance that fact.
See you at RailsConf Europe? I sure hope so! Remember, it’s September 14-15 in London. Register today.
P.S.: Americans are more than welcome too. Considering all the great exclusive speakers line up and the opportunity for a more intimate experience, I think you have a strong argument for a trip to London this September.
For next year, let me suggest that it at least be named differently. Like Nikolaj Nyholm, co-chair of EuroOSCON says in the comments to my blog post (linked above), by branding this on RailsConf Europe, and the other one just RailsConf, the perception is clearly that this is secondary and the other primary.
I’m glad I brought up the question, so you could give this rebuttal. I’ve talked to several people who had the same concerns, and this addresses them.
Me? I’d love to go, but I’d hate to sit in a room alone with David and the rest of them (hm, come to think about it, that would be kinda cool).
No, really, I’d much prefer it if we all gang up and go together.
I’ll lee you at RailsConf Europe.
“And let’s assert the fact that Rails is not an American invention or property.” By you immigrating to America, it seems that its becoming American property.
Allow me to reveal a secret, then. I’m moving back next year ;)
Half a year ago I tried to start using RoR at the company I work for. It became obvious, after a few tests, that RoR was great… as long as your application was in English. The support for unicode, and localization was, and still seems to be, in its infancy.
I still have hope in using RoR someday, but I certainly can’t justify spending money going to an event about a technology that I don’t use, and I don’t plan to use in the short term.
I just thought that I should mention that this might be one of the reasons for the lack of interest, at least outside UK.
I’m going to be there, and I’ve managed to drum up another 14 people from the local ruby user group. I should be getting commission!
Like David, my primary concern at the moment is trying to make sure that there’s a viable environment for us (for me) to be developing in Ruby for as long as it still makes me happy. Certainly in the UK, that’s not going to be easy, but look at it this way: if we don’t make this work, we’re all going to be coding in Java in a few years. What better motivation is there than that!
I’d love to go there, though as a student, £575 is about £500 too much…
sigh. See you in RailsConf 2010 ;)
salva, I can sympathize with your concerns that those issues doesn’t seem to have as great a visibility as they could.
But do realize that we have big communities in both Russia and Japan that somehow manages to make it work. So its certainly not like its impossible.
Even at 37signals, we have customers from 50+ countries that all use our applications with local input (UI is in English, but their content is in Russia, Thai, whatever).
I’d love to go, and I’ll actually be in London that weekend for a family wedding. But as the trip will already be costing so much I just can’t afford to plunk down the extra $1000+.
So it looks like my only hope is to wait for next year in portland and the upcoming regional ruby conferences.
I find the apparent lack of interest a bit surprising, especially considering the success of the US RailsConf. I guess the price might have some influence. I’ve been toying with the idea of attending the conference but it’s too expensive to pay out of my own pocket, and I’m pretty sure my employer is not going to pay a cent :(
JavaPolis (Belgium) seems to be quite popular and it’s reasonably priced (they have support from the big companies though). Again, I’m not sure if that’s the real cause.
Speaking of conferences: There’s a German RailsConf coming up on 3. November.
http://railsconf.de/
I’m an American living on the East Coast who didn’t go to Rails Conf USA, but who has already purchased his RailsConf Europe ticket and flights. Why? Outside of the opportunity to check out London – I’ll be in town 2 extra days to see what I can of the lovely city – access. This conference is smaller, and that means David and the rest of the Rails luminaries will have a lot less people competing for their attention than at the larger conferences. I, for one, am looking forward to sitting down with the core team and buying the first few pitchers. How about it David? ;)
I’m staying anon on this one as I’ll be going against the grain.
It really does come down to price for me. If London is too expensive a venue, don’t hold it in London – I would be more than willing to travel out to the suburbs if it meant the price was halved. Why didn’t you hold it somewhere cheaper in the UK with good transport links? Manchester? Edinburgh? Or even somewhere in the rest of Europe with good links that isn’t quite so pricey – London is one of the most expensive cities on Earth!
I’ve set up my own business off the back of Rails. I write Rails code every day. I live and work within a distance that makes London not impossible to get to cheaply (less than 200 miles). I even have a friend I can crash with in London to save on hotel bills. I would like to attend. Of course I would.
But £575!? Even with the Early Bird, at £475 it’s WAAAYYYY too expensive. RailsConf in the US was less than half that price with early bird, and therefore for the same money – THE SAME MONEY – I could have got a plane to Chicago, stayed at somebody’s place for a week and attended RailsConf US.
I think next year I’ll just fly to the US and save money. When you hold a conf 2 hours away from me on the train, you seem to think charging double is acceptable, which makes me sad.
Next year, get a cheaper venue, anywhere. If you need help because you don’t know where the good, cheap venues are, just ask…
/agree with others about i18n. Making claims about Rails not being American-centric is farcical in light of the complete lack of foreign language support. The TimeZone class doesn’t even handle Daylight Savings, kinda useless, imho (there is a plugin for this, but why not just put it in core?)
Out of interest, why was London chosen?
Yes there are a lot of conferences held in London but there are also a lot held in Bermingham UK and Manchester UK both of which have great access and facilities and would likely be a fraction of the cost that London facilities are.
DHH said: > Allow me to reveal a secret, then. > I’m moving back next year ;)
May I ask you why?
And: Why did you move to the USA in the first place?
I can’t understand the choice of London either. Even though I live a 25 minute train ride from London, it would still cost me £33 per day to get there, or an insane amount of cash to stay in the city.
Manchester or Birmingham would have been cheaper to rent out, stay in and get to.
It’s shame that most (all?) of the speakers are having to be flown in, hiking the price up. Don’t we have enough EuroTalent?
While it would be awesome to see the speakers, I’ll be catching the sessions online then networking/discussing with folks over free pizza at the London Pizza on Rails get-togethers http://pizzaonrails.com
If you’re in London for the conference, leave the madness behind for a day or two afterwards and come down to sunny Brighton. :-)
Speaking of RailsConf – any idea when the Why the Lucky Stiff presentation will be up at ScribeMedia?
I live just an hour away from London and would really like to attend, but I just can’t afford the entrance fee.
I even considered submitting a presentation just so that I could get in free!
Why not move it outside of London and drop the price? I would definitely go.
On the other hand the UK is a Microsoft only country (apart from a few banks that use Java). The attitudes of companies in the UK towards non-Microsoft technology are very different to those in America and even other places in Europe (that was what my presentation would have been about). Possibly that, together with the prohibitive price, is why people aren’t signing up?
Gotta say (sadly) that the deciding factor (like a lot of others it seems) was price – I’m a UK freelancer that’s moving from PHP to Rails, loves Rails, trying to move all my work/clients to it but there is NO way I’m spending £575 before accomodation and travel expenses – I reckon (knowing London) about £1000 all in , that’s about $1800 – hell I can get a brand new Apple laptop for that
Now I would LOVE to go, seriously, but I’m highly surprised that anyone is going who isn’t being paid for by a company – either that or you’re a damn successful freelancer already and you’re going not because you need to, but rather to send your skills stratospheric
sorry if this comes across as hard-nosed, I adore both ruby as langauage and the rails framework, and the work you guys put in is incredible but I thought I should be honest as to why I won’t be able to attend
I would love to go, but since my talk did not get selected, I’m stuck with paying $1,000 since it’s past the early bird special. Perhaps if you could lower the price by at least $400, I’d really consider going. I’ve already dropped $700 for RailsConf in Chicago(I was able to sav on the Hotel by staying with friends), now you’re talking $2000 for Europe. Don’t forget RubyConf either. I simply can’t afford to spend that much. However, if the talks and conference material are purchasable online like RailsConf in Chicago, I’ll be happy to purchase them to see what I’ve missed.
Why is everyone whining about the 1000 price tag? yes, rails is very English specific and DHH has openly mocked the concept of supporting other languages “because 37 signal customer base is mostly english speaking”, but that is no reason for a company to be non web 2.0 and not shell out 1000 bucks for something which they can’t concievably use.
So which one is it David? Should we go and fuck ourselves when it suits you, and then we should attend these overpriced “conferences” when the credibility of the hype based edifice is at stake?
I hope I have to eat my words, but by next year even RailsConf will have greatly diminished membership after the crass commercialist shenannigans which have gone on in RailsCanada and RailsConf2006
easy come easy go.
I agree that rails needs better i18n. It would boost rails outside the US better than any conference. Noone claims that it’s impossible to support other languages than English, but it’s much more complicated than it could be, especially if you need a multilingual UI.
“kreJ diputS”.reverse, Crass commercialist shenanigans at RailsConf 2006? A non-profit conference put on by a non-profit corporation. What are you talking about?
just come to Paris guys… :)
I don’t aggree with a lot of over heated crit about the lack of i18n. If you want it build it, and people are aren’t they?
This is just a price issue for me, would love to but can’t just right now. I do also think if it could have been made more affordable it would have upped the community feel a bit more, making the thing a bit more soft and cuddlly. The choice of venue was a bit flash but really you could have found something much better value even in London even if it were an old church hall or whatever I think it might have been a bit more interesting and probably more fun.
I’d love to go, I spend most of my spare time coding Ruby/Rails but my day job is still Java. I personally can’t afford the ~ £500 plus hotel and travel costs. My employer is not prepared to pay for me to go to a conference, “we’re a Java house, why would you want to go here?”. Rails is still fairly young in the UK – true, there are a number of positions available but not as many as people think.
I’ll see you there :-)
I live and work in London so I guess I avoid some of the problems other people had to worry about. I’ve stumped up the fee myself, but with a discount from going to http://pizzaonrails.com/
I’m with Al and C. I live in UK. About an hour from london or so. 525 + 100 for food and transport is over £300 per day.
It doesn’t matter how good it is, if it costs me significantly more than a days wages it’s way too steep.
I reckon a large number of Rails developers are freelancers like myself, or in small teams. I suspect that has a lot to do with the lack of enthusiasm.
I don’t think a lack of popularity of Rails in Europe has anything to do with this.
I know I’m not coming for the same reason most people are mentioning, the price is to high. I would love to come, but spending something between EUR 1.000 and 1.500 on a two day conference doesn’t seem like a good investment.
For me the cost is definitely a problem.
Maybe next year…
RailsConf Europe is expensive in absolute terms, but not in relative terms. London is one of the most expensive cities in the world and conferences there are pricey.
Maybe next time it could be in a cheaper (and sunnier) city such as Lisbon, Barcelona, Florence or Evian….
Same reason as most other for me—cost. I could get cheap flights to London from Edinburgh, but the cost of admission plus hotel costs are just too prohibitive, especially since my employer would not contribute toward the cost as Rails development is not part of our core activities.
Contrast the price of this to something like d.Construct in Brighton on 8 September, (£75+VAT but is only a single day) which I will be attending.
Dom – The “heated crit” over i18n is mostly brought about by the tone of the blog post, that rails is not American centric, when this contrasts with previous statements about not wishing to support other languages precisely because rails IS american focused.
Also, while I’m one of the critics on this point, it should still be noted that rails comes free, and I’m glad its around (i.e. thanks dhh et al). But hey, not-so-strong international interest might be for a reason, eh?
Just for the record, the difficulties I found while trying to develop an app with the UI and data in Spanish, were too many, but I was really interested to try Rails, and, nevertheless, I recently decided that I would give it a try in a different smaller app. I just had to obtain data from a DB2 database and show it to the user in a web page. The DB2 connector from IBM had just appeared, so it all seemed simple…
Then I discovered that trying to access tables whose names were not in English, and in plural, was more cumbersome than Hibernate + Jboss (our initial platform).
Ruby is a VERY promising platform, but it’s problems with i18n, and using pre-existing databases, make it very hard to use in a corporate environment. I keep an eye on this blog, waiting for the time this two problems are solved ;-).
That means that, most probably (and the comments seem to indicate so), most people using RoR commercially are freelances and small companies, for whom the price is quite expensive (I wouldn’t be able to afford any Jboss, Novell, or IBM seminars, similar to this one, if my company didn’t pay for them!).
As Andy has recommended, you should go to somewhere cheaper and sunnier next time. Even if the price for the event is the same, the stay will be much cheaper, and I’m pretty sure it’s easy to justify the expense (if you are a freelance) by staying a couple of days more and thinking of it like a small vacation.
hmm so lets see…
You don’t like Java and all that it stands for, but you want to act like java, i.e, Big, Bloated, Pretentious and Expensive.
You profess DRY, but you have 3 conferences in a single year.
You pretend to hate “enterprisey” but you want to charge prices which ‘mature’, ‘enterprisey’ frameworks/technologies charge. (At least they pay lip service to the Enterprise—You want the Enterprise to rip open their 30,000 table schema anre reimplement everything with integer keys) [spare me the link to Dr. Nic ]
You tell people to go EFF themselves when they ask for multi-language support in core, but you want people to attend RailsConf “EEE YOU” no less and pay 1000’s while doing it. RailsConf for a European Union where majority of the nations speak languages other than English.
Why would a swede or a fin or a dane or a greek should come to the snootiest place on earth? to attend a “CONf” which doesn’t even cater to their linguistic needs?
contradictions contradictions..
All you people whining about i18n – what’s preventing you from developing a plugin, or submitting a patch (not that I care to see i18n in core, at this time anyway)?
Joe, David said that RoR was not an American think, and I just answered that, until i18n is implemented, it might not be American, but it certainly is only for English speaking countries. If you don’t care, fine. I don’t need RoR for anything, I just like it, and wanted to inform of one of the reasons for its slow adoption in Europe.
Thankfully there are people, with more time than me, making the efford to solve this problem, and I hope I will be able to use RoR sometime. If not, well, it’s not like I dislike J2EE, I just wanted to give RoR a try.
P.S. Answers like yours make more harm than good to OSS projects.
I can understand everyone’s sensitivities regarding cost and location, but I personally believe the venting is getting blown out of proportion.
The math is really simple. If you don’t believe that the value you will get out of the conference is greater than what you pay, then don’t go. You can always get the proceedings.
To put some perspective I am flying all the way from Hawaii for this conference, and yes I am paying for the very expensive hotel rooms,airfares, and I even paid for my Early bird conference registration when the conference was announced because I didn’t want to miss out like I did when I delayed on registering for Rails Conf Chicago.
But I am doing it because I see value in the conference and I believe the return on investment is there. You can’t make money without spending money, and while it may hurt those that have to do it personally if you are able and you are serious about Rails I would go.
Regarding i18n, I think there are many ways to achieve this without having to embed it in core. Java didn’t have i18n for a long time, and yet applications were still rolled out all around the world.
I was lucky enough to recently have my talk accepted about how we are revolutionizing the airline industry with RoR, and how you can use RoR to revolutionize your own industry. I cover how we are deploying our booking engine built on Rails but it does Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, etc.. oh yeah… and English! :) We did it in Rails, and I didn’t need the core to change to do it. Consider this a shameless plug, but if you are interested in i18n you may be interested in my presentation.
I am planning on doing a Hawaii on Rails event next year. But with such negative feedback on the London conference I am not sure what the response would be like on doing a conference in Hawaii.
If you like the idea, send me an email…. if you don’t please do me a favor and save an electron and don’t send me an email! (smile)
Hopefully I’ll see a lot of you out in London.
Aloha,
Soren
salva, you obviously didn’t read DHH’s comment #7 in DIRECT RESPONSE TO YOU, which is that large numbers of people in Japan and Russia have “somehow” figured out how to use Rails.
P.S. Whining and ignoring the facts like you’ve done makes more harm than good to OSS projects. Touche!
Joe, I read DHH’s comment. Have you tried to implement a solution in a language different from English? Just as an example, one of the steps involves manually modifying some of the core Ruby files (the one that has the error messages). Is it possible? Sure! If you read my other post, you’ll notice that I decided to give it a try even if this was only of a few relevant problems that I found while trying to develop the app (It’s pretty ironic that a language invented by a Japanese has problems supporting Unicode :) ).
However, as it is now, I would never, ever, use a solution like this for one of our customers. Not, when there are alternatives that I already use and work.
When I made my first post, my intention was not to troll, it was to give David an idea of one of the reasons that’s pushing back the use of Rails outside the USA. If you want to increase the numbers of users that use your product, wouldn’t you like to know the reason why they don’t?
You’ll be great at marketing. Abuse the people that have a problem using your product! That will show them!! :D
I was being serious about my P.S., I didn’t try to offend you (well, maybe a little!) If David had answered to my comment whining like you (instead of politely telling me that there are people that have managed to use it), you could be sure that I would never think of using RoR again.
P.S. I don’t think there is anything else to say about this. If you feel better abusing the users of this blog, feel free to do so, but please, ignore me.
Garth Williams… Rubbish!
“On the other hand the UK is a Microsoft only country (apart from a few banks that use Java).”
Dominic Mitchell…. do you know any others in Brighton interest in Rails?
I paid out of my own pocket for RailsConf Europe and believe me I don’t have £500 to spare. This is a unique opportunity that I expect to pay a handsome return.
The value from 2 days learning from people like David Black, Dave Thomas and DHH are worth so much more than the ticket price.
A few short months ago I did an excellent introduction to rails session with Geoff Grosenbach which was the same price as the earlybird for RailsConf Europe. Geoff did an excellent job, I expect to get even more from RailsConf.
If you are serious about Rails and intend to use it beyond a hobbyist interest GET YOURSELF THERE, if you don’t you can bet the chance will not come around again.
Ahhh!!!
Why on earth do people feel the need to whine about open source?
You are not being sold anything! You are under no obligation to use it!
If features are missing FEEL FREE TO IMPLEMENT THEM YOURSELF!
I just bought my plane ticket today. I’ll be there! (Flying in from Oslo, Norway)
Thanks, but I’ll just wait for the streaming video.
I’ve just booked. Even though my work is in the “real world”, a couple of days in the Rails parallel universe will give me a lot to bring back.
Perhaps the lack of interest is due to the bugs international people find when trying to use RoR.
For example basic things like dates can break the system when not in the American format.
Geoff,
How did the 2 day session for Ryan & Gill go? I liked the idea of the session but it was a choice between you and RailsConf Europe ;)
salva: You’re the whiner and I’d NEVER want you as a customer. Why do you expect everything to be done for you and why do you whine so much when it’s not? Instead, why don’t you get working on a plugin or a patch? CONTRIBUTE rather than only TAKE. I think DHH’s infamous Canada on Rails slide was perhaps directly at people like you.
“If you are serious about Rails and intend to use it beyond a hobbyist interest GET YOURSELF THERE, if you don’t you can bet the chance will not come around again.”
I think it’s quite easily possible to become a fully comptetent Rails developer without having attended a conference – read all the books, interact with the mailing lists, read all the online tutorials, docs, etc, and most importantly code up real RAils apps. But the conferences seem great too – the presentations from RailsConf were full of interesting info.
Free ticket available…
One of our guys can’t make it to RailsConf Europe so we’ve got a spare ticket, which we’d happily give to a deserving case (I’m assuming we’re allowed to substitute attendees).... if you are interested, email
railsconf at amphora hyphen research dot com
(obviously replacing the punctuation in the above address).
I’d love to take my small company (3 developers) there, but I can’t justify the cost even for myself.
For that much money, plus transport and accom I can take a couple of days off work AND buy a shed load of the almost-edge books coming out as PDFs.
Maybe when I have my subscription based app earning cash by the bucket load these sort of things will become more accessible to me.
I will be there!
I’m doing the journey from munich. It’s a lot of money and as a freelancer I have to add the money I do not earn in the hours I’m there.
But the speakers are the best up to date and the opportunity to join a group of enthusiastic people: Why not? So I agree with Joe!
Expand your personal network and learn from the best!
We’ll be there doing a power session using Rails and RadRails.
Shoot me a mail if you want to meet up.
It sounds like a great conference I’d love to come. Kinda off topic bit I wanted to ask has anyone recommend a good UK based host for ruby on rails development?
Thanks Paul
Great response to RailsConf Europe!
Just a quick note to say that there has certainly not been any lack of interest in RailsConf Europe, smaller maybe than the US, we will still be enjoying great speakers and plenty of registrants so it is promising to be an interesting and very worthwhile event to learn, exchange ideas and network.
The (Trade Union) congress centre has well equipped rooms and has previously proven ideal for similar events – it has nice intimate rooms as well as one large hall to accomodate an exciting programme put together by David Black and Chad Fowler (5 tracks!). In addition, lunch will be provided on both days as well as ‘drinks&snacks” on the Thursday night…
and London is really very nice too…
Hope to see you all soon!
“It’s shame that most (all?) of the speakers are having to be flown in, hiking the price up.”
You do know that most of the speakers have to pay for their flights and hotel costs themselves.