Chad Fowler: If you want to come to RailsConf, you should
register today. We sold out 400 seats in less than a week.
These last 150 seats are likely to go fast.
At RubyConf 2005,
David Heinemeier Hansson
asked the audience if there was interest in a Rails
Conference. There was some interest, but privately I thought
this was a bit too early. In fact, more than a bit too early,
way too early.
It looks like I was wrong. Way wrong.
The Ruby Conference attracted nearly 200 people to San
Diego. This was reportedly nearly three times the attendance
to RubyConf 2004 in Chantilly, Virginia (I wasn’t there).
And Rails is presumably only a subset of the Ruby audience.
According to the registration web site, the conference
organizers originally intended to have a tiered pricing scheme: the
posted Regular rates, the Early bird rates, and the Super
Early-bird rates. This has effectively been overtaken by
demand to be the considerably flatter scheme of Super Early-bird
rates and those who wished they could attend.
It looks like with 550 seats in Chicago, they will be at the
point of turning people away.
Seeing this, I signed up today. And those who know me know
that I consistently try to keep my options open until the last
minute.
I’ll be there as well - “North Carolina Represent.”
And they haven’t even announced what the sessions are going to be yet. So I think most of the crowd will really just be going to hear Why The Lucky Stiff and The Thirsty Cups rock out. I know that’s my plan.
mgc: undoubtedly _why’s session boosted registrations, but I believe that the first 400 seats sold out before _why’s presentation was announced. Impressive.
Rails is a superset of Ruby, not the other way around. Technically it’s the other way around of course, but a conference is about motivation and identity, not technical dependencies, and the new influx of people are attaching themselves to Rails, not Ruby.
Hi Sam, we actually just sold out the additional 150 seats that were made available. It took 24 hours. So it certainly looks like there’s some hot-on interest. Definitely surprised even the most bullish of us. It’s going to be one heck of a special first conference.
Sour grapes? No, it’s just a statement of what should be obvious. Are people saying “hey, Ruby is cool, I think I’ll use it for web programming. Oh! And I’ll use Rails.” Nope, it’s almost entirely the other way around. Assuming that the Ruby community is a superset of the Rails community is a misunderstanding of what “community” is — the set of Ruby users is a superset of the set of Rails users, but users and community are not the same thing.
For instance: it is probably only the last year or so that we’ve seen any real Javascript community, even though there have obviously been users for longer than that. Users and community are very different things.
“No, it’s just a statement of what should be obvious.”
So you admit to having nothing insightful to say? That sounds like sour grapes to me.
Take off your Python-colored glasses for a moment. I’ve lurked in the Rails community, and they aren’t just digging what you can do with Rails--they’re digging Ruby too. Rails lets you do the common CRUD stuff, but once you need to do something interesting (whether it’s integrating with some other system, advanced templating, etc), Ruby is there waiting. It may be sad for some people, but while Python was looking for a way in, Ruby stormed the mind-share castle with Rails.
Mxyzptlk: you are treading dangerously close to violating my moderation policy. Posting under an obvious pseudonym certainly doesn’t help either.
I will say that every time I have talked to David or Matz, or seen David or Matz talk for that matter, they go out of their way to point to the other’s contributions.
There is something totally Zen about this whole relationship between Ruby and Rails.
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