Rails Edge

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a couple of weeks, but with everything going on, there just didn’t seem to be time.

Here’s the news. Registration is open for the next RailsEdge conference in Chicago (August 23-25). Mike and Nicole have posted the session list for Chicago and there are some really great talks lined up for this time around, including a number of new talks that we haven’t done before.

New talks

Chad Fowler will be speaking on “Quick and Clean: Well-Factored Rails”. I really like the emphasis in the Rails community on keeping your code clean (and still beating everyone to market).

Stuart Halloway is adding a talk on Domain Driven Design. Good design is critical to producing a system that flexible and maintainable. Looks like Stu is going to give us the goods on how to do just that.

Justin Gehtland will be talking about JRuby. I was in the JRuby tutorial at RailsConf and the JRuby guys are doing a bang up job of bring JRuby up to speed as a solid platform for rails. If you are in a place that already has Java deployed, then deploying a Rails app has suddenly become as easy as dropping a WAR file on the server. Cool stuff.

And it looks like I will be able to reprise my “DSL: Speaking the Lingo” talk from RubyConf a couple years ago. If anything, the DSL story in Ruby has gotten even stronger than before. And in addition to juggling and Rubiks Cube from the original talk, I have a little extra surprise just for the Chicago crowd.

New Speakers

In addition to all the new talks, we have several new speakers featured at the Chicago venue.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz will be speaking on “Mongrel: Learning how to walk the dog” and “Xen and the Art of Rails Deployment”. Deployment issues seemed to be at the top of the list of concerns at RailsConf and Ezra will help set us straight.

At past RailsEdge conferences, the feedback was strong about having more coverage on the topic of testing. So as not to disappoint, we will have David Chelimsky talk about “RSpec: Behavior Driven Rails” and Mike Mangino will cover “Testing in the Real World”.

See you there

That’s just the new stuff for Chicago. We still have a great selection of topics from previous RailsEdge conferences. See the current schedule for a complete list of topics.

All in all, it looks like a really great lineup of speakers and topics. I hope to see you there.

Rails Edge

This is exciting. I have been wanting to talk about this for some time. Well, the time has finally come and I’m happy to announce that the Pragmatic Programmers are putting together a series of regional conferences called The Rails Edge.

The conference will be a single track, so all the speakers at the conference will be available for interaction at all the talks, not just during their own presentation. The speaker selection is great (I feel humbled to be a member of the group). We are hoping that it will a dynamic experiance with the speakers interacting, not only with the audience, but with the other members of the staff.

So, if you didn’t make it into the “Lucky 250” club going to RubyConf this year, here is another chance to meet and greet Rubyists in your area.

I hope to see you there.

Update: You can read the official Pragmatic Programmer’s Announcment too.