RailsConf 2006

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.”

Should be a great conference.

Posted by Wade Minter at
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.

Posted by mgc at
mgc: undoubtedly _why’s session boosted registrations, but I believe that the first 400 seats sold out before _why’s presentation was announced.  Impressive.

Posted by Sam Ruby at
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.

Posted by Ian Bicking at
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.

Posted by David Heinemeier Hansson at

we actually just sold out the additional 150 seats that were made available. It took 24 hours

Damn!  I’m glad I caught the window.  ;-)

Posted by Sam Ruby at
There’s also the Canada On Rails event ([link]) on the west coast coming up in April... and it doesn’t appear to be sold out yet.

Posted by Jeff at

“the new influx of people are attaching themselves to Rails, not Ruby”

[link]

Posted by AC at

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.

Posted by Ian Bicking at

“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.

Posted by Mxyzptlk at

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.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

Add your comment












Nav Bar