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 2008

Posted by Mark Gardner on 12 January 2009 19:47

The third annual Ruby on Rails conference ended today (RailsConf 2008 - O'Reilly Conferences, May 29 - June 01, 2008,Portland, Oregon). Our CTO, Chad Fowler served as conference chair and co-host along with Rich Kilmer. Chad told the audience that this conference did not sell out. What he was really saying was that the decision was made to accommodate as many attendees as possible. In point of fact, over 2,000 developers attended, a 25% increase over the previous year where attendance was capped at 1,600.

Chad noted that the conference committee had over 300 talk submissions from which they had to select only a handful for the available speaking slots during the three days of the event. Compare this to the fact the first Ruby Conference in 2001 only had 30 people attend. There were 10x the number of topics submitted as there were attendees only 7 years ago.

There were a lot of talks and releases of note but the two that stood out were the Mod_Rails and Maglev presentations. Mod_Rails (Overview — Phusion Passenger™ (a.k.a. mod_rails)), now officially called Phusion Passenger dramatically simplifies the deployment of Rails apps. Maglev from GemStone (MagLev - Ruby that scales) promised dramatic speed changes for Ruby deployments that can scale.

Our own Tom Copeland, who administers the RubyForge (RubyForge: Welcome) site on the side, received one of the six new "Ruby Heroes" awards at the conference. With Rich's help, Tom was able to accept the honor via IM.

Here are some shots from the conference.

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