Mark Gardner

A serial entrepreneur and consultant, Mark is the original co-founder of the company with Rich. With over 30 years of small and big company operational, sales and marketing experience, Mark heads up the administrative and operational side of the company. He is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Marine Officer.

RailsConf 2009 - A Good Time in Vegas

Posted by Mark Gardner on 18 May 2009 17:19

First three photos by James Duncan Davidson. Fourth photo by John Athayde

The fourth annual Ruby on Rails conference concluded last week and was a success despite the dreary economy. The final tally of registered attendees came in at 1,300 which was down slightly from the high last year but still made it the second largest of the four conferences. Chad and Rich were the conference co-chairs.

The big topic/theme of the event was the "coming soon" Rails 3.0 which will incorporate the many ideas of the Merb framework that is being merged into it. The new Rails core team of developers ended the event with a Q&A.

The presentations and other links from the event are listed below.

One very important item that came out of the conference was the confirmation that Rails is being used in the Enterprise in a big way. Over a third of the attendees indicated that they worked in large enterprises on Rails projects. Another third of the audience were consultants that split their time between Enterprises and start-ups (The other third were all from start-ups). If that straw poll is correct, that means about half of all the Rails work being done is being done under the radar at companies to solve major business problems internally or to create new web-based corporate products. If this is indeed true, as many of us in the Rails consulting community believe it is, Rails has crossed a major threshold that will help its growth and success. This tied nicely to the theme of one of the keynote presenters, Robert Martin, who explained why Smalltalk failed. The main reason, in his opinion, was that it was not applied to solve real (and boring) business problems. It was not allowed to get its hands dirty. For that reason Ruby and Rails probably have already escaped the Smalltalk curse.

Official Site: http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009/
Official photo gallery by James Duncan Davidson
Videos of presentations
RailsEnvy "RailsConf 2009 in 34 Minutes" Video

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