Ruby / Rails Conferences
Posted by Gregg Pollack January 28, 2009 @ 01:35 PM
When the economy hits a downturn this typically has an immediate effect on tech conferences. Many tech conferences cannot run successfully without sponsorships, and with companies becoming more conservative with spending the marketing budget is usually the first item to get cut.
So yet another way you can help Ruby and Rails Activism is by attending (supporting) a conference. Below you’ll find conferences coming up in the next 6 months. If you think I’ve missed one, or if the information is incorrect, please post a comment.
February 6-7 – Acts As Conference in Orlando, Florida
Cost: $125
February 19-21 – RubyRx in Durham, North Carolina
Cost: $550
March 12-14 – MountainWest RubyConf 2009 in Salt Lake City, Utah
Cost: $100
March 26-28 – Scotland on Rails in Scotland, United Kingdom
Cost: £150
April 3-4 – Locos X Rails in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cost: ?
April 4 – LA Ruby Conf 2009 in Los Angeles, California
Cost: $75
April 17-18 – Golden Gate Ruby Conference in San Francisco, California
Cost: ?
May 4-7 – RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada
Cost: $695
May 9-10 – Euruko 2009 in Barcelona, Spain
Cost: 30 Euro
May 15-18 – RailsCamp 5 in Brisbane, Australia
Cost: $120 AUD
Update
Since I initially wrote up this post, there have been several more events I’ve been made aware of (from the comments):
- RubyCamp Lyon, France, February 21, Cost: Free
- Ruby on OS X, Amsterdam, May 15-16, Cost: ?.
- Ruby DCamp Washington DC, September 18-19, Cost: Free
It’s pretty cool to see more RubyCamps. I’m a big fan of BarCamp type events where you keep admission free. Perhaps in this financial climate these types of events will prosper more then they normally do. Feel free to bug me if you want help putting one of these together or need help with publicity.
RubyCamp Lyon (France), 21th february. Cost : free
http://barcamp.org/RubyCampLyon
May 15 & 16 in Amsterdam: Ruby on OS X: An event about building Mac apps with Ruby and Cocoa. See http://rubyonosx.com/ for details. Cost will be below $100.
Rails, like most all web frameworks, uses JavaScript at a key level, so you might want to check out JSConf which is starting for the first time this year.
http://www.jsconf2009.com
Cost is $450 early bird, but is going to provide a full featured conference with a lot of attendee focus and benefits. Location is Washington DC.
Just catched a typo: it’s Euruko, not Euroko. In fact, the original name coined by David Black is EuRuKo: “Europaeische Ruby Konferenz”.
The cost is to be defined but yeah, the range is around 30Euro.
Ruby DCamp (http://rubydcamp.org) this year in DC on September 18-19 and, with luck, will be completely free (as in beer).
Last year, we drew a crowd of about 75 eager and willing Ruby developers.
Registration for Golden Gate Ruby Conference will open on Monday, Feb 2. Cost will be announced then. Space for up to 200 to attend, and sponsorship spots are still available.
there is this huge glut of conferences, way too many. if some die off, that’s a good thing, natural selection.
The reason to attend a conference should be whether it provides value to you offsetting the cost.
If folks are going as a charity, then the prices end up artificially high.
RailsConf, at $700, will be full of corporate hacks looking to have a little fun on the company’s dollar.
If you want to help Ruby/Rails activism, you should contribute some code or documentation, or engage in evangelism, etc.
It’s disheartening to look at this list, and see no Canadian events. The last (and only?) one was 3 years ago in Vancouver.
Thanks for the MtnWest plug Gregg! I am continually impressed by the quantity and quality of the community organized Ruby and Rails conferences. Any support you can give by speaking, attending, or sponsoring these conferences helps us all. That, and they are a hell of a good time! :)
I strongly believe the German Rails Conference (“Rails Konferenz”) will take place again, would be great if you added it to the list: http://rails-konferenz.de
I’m assuming CabooseConf at RailsConf will be free as well this year. Can’t afford to go to RailsConf proper, but perhaps a flight and hotel to sit around and hack with the attendees might be worth it.
Gregg, thanks for adding us to the post but please note that the price for the Ruby on OS X Conference is still to be defined. It should turn out to be below $100.
We’re also looking for speakers and sponsors, so get in touch if you’re interested.
Gregg, appreciate the Rails Camp mention (and there’ll be one in the UK in August, and likely one in California in May – details for both are still sketchy though), but it’s not a free event. It is, however, relatively cheap – generally around the $120 AUD mark ($84 USD).
There used to be a google calendar for this, check:
http://blog.jayfields.com/2008/01/rubyrails-conferences.html
.. can we revive this? Or what’s best way to collect and subscribe to those dates?
from Japan.
RubyKaigi 2009, Tokyo, July 17-19, Cost: ? http://rubykaigi.org/2009 (under construction)
It’s not a Ruby conference, but there will be a lot of Ruby-based content at the annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference, set for March 26-27, right outside of Philadelphia. The annual event is also known as Philly Emerging Tech and ETE.
Rubyists on the speaker roster include:
—David Black, author of Ruby for Rails and The Well-Grounded Rubyist
—David Chelimsky, RSpec Lead Developer
—Corey Haines, of Pair Programming Tour (http:// programmingtour.blogspot.com/) and “How I Got Started in Programming” Interviews (http://geekstorycorp.blogspot.com/) fame
—Brian Marick, Agile Manifesto co-author; author of Everyday Scripting with Ruby
—Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, of the Rails Envy Podcast
—Nick Sieger, JRuby core team member
—Ezra Zygmuntowicz, creator of the Merb framework and co-founder of Engine Yard
The keynote speakers will be Andy Hunt, co-founder of The Pragmatic Programmers; Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs for RedHat; and Jascha Franklin-Hodge (co-founder and CTO of Blue State Digital, the company that helped create and manage Barack Obama’s online social network).
Other speakers include jQuery creator John Resig; Bill Dudney, author of Core Animation for the iPhone and co-author of iPhone SDK Development; Ed Burnette, author of Hello, Android: Introducing Google’s Mobile Development Platform; Jeremy Sydik, author of Designing Accessible Web Sites.
If you register by February 15, you get the early bird rate of $240 per person. The early bird group rate is $180 per person (3 passes for the price of 4). After February 15, the cost is $290 per person, or $217 per person with the group discount.
For more information: www.phillyemergingtech.com