BenCurtis.com

If you were secretly wishing for yet another Rails conference to happen, wish no more, for acts_as_conference is here! Personally, I’m excited about it, for a few reasons.

First, it’s being put on by the fine Rails for All folks, and they do good stuff. Second, this looks like it’s going to be a smaller conference, and that’s a plus in my book. Third, it’s going to be in southern Florida in the winter. You can’t lose! :)

For me, there are two reasons to go to conferences like RailsConf: to learn cool stuff, and to meet cool people. I have no doubts that this year’s RailsConf will be great on the content side. I am a bit worried that it will suck on the people side, though. It’s not that I think the people there won’t be cool, it’s just that there will be so many people to meet!

Canada on Rails was a fun, single-track conference where I got to meet a bunch of great people for the first time (in person, at least). RailsConf06 was similarly fun, but on a bigger scale. It was a bummer to have to miss out on some of the content because of the multi-track format. RubyConf06 was fun like Canada on Rails was. The content and people were excellent at all three, but there is something to be said for having a smaller crowd.

So, I want you to help make RailsConf not suck (at least, for me), and I’m going to give you an incentive to do so. I want to meet you. Really. I’ve probably chatted with you on IRC, or exchanged emails with you on the mailing list, or maybe you just read my blog. At any rate, I want to put a face with a name, and with 1,200+ people at the conference center, that’s going to be a bit of challenge. I want you to find me.

Why should you bother? Here’s why: If you find me, introduce yourself, and take one of my business cards, I will donate $4 to Ruby Central. I’m going to print up a batch of 250 cards just for RailsConf, so if I meet 250 people and give away all these cards, I’ll donate $1,000 to Ruby Central.

Here’s a pic of me so you can find me. I’m looking forward to meeting you. :)

Jon is announcing new social networking features at Confabb, so now I get to mention it, too. :)

It was fun to build the personal messaging, buddy lists, and user search for Confabb, building on the work I’d done and the ideas I had for ConferenceMeetup.

Now that some of my client work is starting to see the light of day, I guess it’s time to add Clients page to my site.

I just launched a ConferenceMeetup site for RailsConf 2007. As I wrote in my post announcing ConferenceMeetup, this was an app inspired by what I wish I would have had when I attended RailsConf 2006 and RubyConf 2006, and I hope others attending RailsConf this year will find it useful.

If you’re planning on attending RailsConf this year, you’re welcome to create a page for yourself at the RailsConf 2007 ConferenceMeetup site. You’ll need to enter the conference password to create your account. The password is “chunky bacon” (without the quotes). With the huge turnout that’s expected to be at the conference, this may be the best way to “bump into” the people you’d like to meet while you’re there.

If you have comments or suggestions about the site, I’d love to hear them. Feel free to let me know what you think.

I was a little surprised to read about Confabb this morning. I’ve been working on a similar type of application, ConferenceMeetup, in my spare time.

After going to a few conferences, I really wanted a tool that could help me connect with other people while at the conference, so I built one. The idea behind the app is to provide a private community site for conferences where their attendees can learn about each other, connect with each other, and provide feedback to conference organizers and presenters about the presentations.

It’s been a fun project, partly because Rails makes it so easy to build these types of applications. I think that ConferenceMeetup would be useful to have at any conference. In fact, I appreciate the validation of having some smart people agree with me on the value of having such a service. :)

Update:

After reading Tim’s comment for this blog post, I was reminded that I didn’t mention Web Connections (which I had intended to do — sorry, Tim!), the app that he built that has the same sort of theme. I saw his app after building ConferenceMeetup and I really liked it. I agree with his comment that it really is about the community of people that are participating in the conference. Connecting with the people there makes the event much more enjoyable.