O’Reilly news

RailsConf 2008 Largest International Gathering of Ruby and Rails Developers: New Community Project Code-Drive Challenges Hackers

April 17, 2008

Sebastopol, CA?Registration has opened for RailsConf 2008, scheduled for May 29 through June 1 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Copresenters Ruby Central and O'Reilly Media have announced the program, which combines keynotes, sessions, tutorials, panels, and events in an interactive meeting ground for the innovative Rails experts and companies. The conference provides attendees with examples of successful business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses new to the Web and Rails to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.

Program chair Chad Fowler has introduced a new event, Community Project Code-Drive, on the conference's first day. Project leaders and like-minded developers can spend the day hacking together, after project owners pitch their projects and attendees organize themselves into groups to work on those projects. "I'm always looking for ways to get humans together for meaningful and potentially lasting interactions at our conferences. So we're trying something new this year during the tutorial day. It happens on the first day of the conference on purpose, so the work can continue for the rest of the conference. My hope is to bring project owners/committers together with aspiring contributors and bring more people into the fold of projects which need help," Fowler says. "Think of it as a room full of code sprints happening all at once."

In addition to this project, tutorials led by experts fill the conference's first day, Thursday May 29.

Jeremy Kember and Kent Beck have joined the keynote speakers. More sessions scheduled for the remainder of the conference, May 30 through June 1, include:

  • "Design Patterns in Ruby" by Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks
  • "Multi-Core Hysteria: FUD about CRUD?" by Andrea O.K. Wright of Chariot Solutions
  • "10 Things I Hate About Web Apps" by Micah Martin of 8th Light, Inc.
  • "Advanced Active Record Techniques: Best Practice Refactoring" by Chad Pytel of thoughtbot, inc.
  • "Advanced RESTful Rails" by Ben Scofield of Viget Labs
  • "Assembling Pages Last: Edge Caching, ESI and Rails" by Aaron Batalion of Hungry Machine, LLC
  • "Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails" by Jonathan Dahl of Slantwise Design
  • "Build Your Own Distributed, Self-Configuring Rails Cluster" by Dave Fayram and Tom Preston-Werner of Powerset, Inc.
  • "Building a Composite Model in Active Record" by Michael Latta of TechnoMage
  • "CRUD Doesn't Have an 'S' in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails" by Stephen Midgley of Hutz.com
  • "Entrepreneurs on Rails" by Dan Benjamin of Rails Machine
  • "Everyday DTrace on OSX: A Guide To Using DTrace for Your Full Application Stack" by Scott Barron and Chad Humphries of EdgeCase
  • "Facebook Development and Performance with Rails" by Mike Mangino of Elevated Rails
  • "Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing" by Dan Manges and Zak Tamsen of ThoughtWorks
  • "Integration Testing with RSpec's Story Runner" by David Chelimsky of Articulated Man, Inc
  • "Optimizing Rails" by Michael Koziarski of Koziarski Software Limited
  • "Surviving the Big Rewrite: Moving YELLOWPAGES.COM to Rails" by John Straw of YELLOWPAGES.COM
  • "The Great Test Framework Dance-Off" by John Susser of Pivotal Labs
  • "The Launch: Dos and Don'ts of Real Life Deploys" by Chris Wanstrath of Err Free
  • "The Profitable Programmer: Creating Successful Side Projects" by Geoffrey Grosenbach of Topfunky Corporation, Tom Preston-Warner of Powerset, Inc., Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett of Err Free, and Ben Curtis of Catch the Best
  • "UI Design on Rails" by Ryan Singer of 37signals
  • "Using Git To Manage and Deploy Rails Apps" by Scott Chacon of Reactrix, Inc.
  • "What To Do When Mongrel Stops Responding to Your Requests and Ruby Doesn't Want To Tell You about It" by Philippe Hanrigou of ThoughtWorks

Sponsors include Engine Yard, Sun Microsystems, FiveRuns, GotThingsDone.com, ThoughtWorks, Atlantic Dominion Solutions, Code Gear, E-xact Transactions, EnterpriseDB, GemStone Systems, Heroku, Morph Labs and New Relic.

For complete conference information, visit:
http://www.railsconf.com

To register, please visit:
http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/content/home/reg

To apply for media credentials, please register at:
http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/content/media

If you'd like to stay up to date on information relating to RailsConf, sign up for the conference newsletter (login required):
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/nl/home#conferences

If you have ideas about areas you'd like to see included at the conference, send a note to:
rails-idea@oreilly.com

To read articles and blogs about RailsConf 2008, visit:
http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/content/news-coverage

To view keynote presentations from RailsConf2007, visit:
http://railsconf.blip.tv

To submit projects for Community Project Code- Drive and check out those already submitted, please visit the Code Drive wiki page at:
http://wiki.oreillynet.com/railsconf2008/index.cgi?CommunityProjectCodeDrive

For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at RailsConf, contact Yvonne Romaine at:
yromaine@oreilly.com

If you would like to discuss forming a media or promotional partnership with O'Reilly for an upcoming event, contact Avila Reese at:
mediapartners@oreilly.com

About Ruby Central
Ruby Central is the parent organization of the annual International Ruby and Rails Conferences and is a visible presence and point of contact for corporate sponsors interested in supporting these conferences and other Ruby activities. For more information, visit: www.rubycentral.org

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

Email a link to this press release