I will be attending RubyConf in Orlando in November. I’m looking forward to it. I won’t be able to stay for the third day, but below are the classes I currently plan to attend on Thursday and Friday. Contact me if you are planning to go too!

Thursday

9:00 - 10:15

Keynote

10:25 - 11:05

Scaling Ruby by Gregg Pollack

11:15 - 12:00

No class for me. Take a break. Probably tired from driving in early. Explore the grounds.

Lunch

1:15 - 2:00

JRuby: What, Why, How…Try It Now

2:10 - 2:55

Recovering from Enterprise: how to embrace Ruby’s idioms and say goodbye to bad habits, by Jamis Buck

3:05 - 3:50

Unfactoring From Patterns: Job Security Through Code Obscurity, by Rein Henrichs

Break

4:20 - 5:05

Better Hacking With Training Wheels, by Joe Martinez

5:15 - 6:00

NeverBlock, trivial non-blocking IO for Ruby, by Mohammad A. Ali

Break

Lightning Talks?

Friday

9:30 - 10:15

Ruby 1.9: What to Expect, by Sam Ruby

10:25 - 11:05

All I Really Need to Know* I Learned by Writing My Own Web Framework, by Ben Scofield

11:15 - 12:00

Coding for Failure: All you need to know for building rock solid applications in 45 minutes, by Tammer Saleh

Lunch

1:15 - 2:00

What Every Rubyist Should Know About Threads, by Jim Weirich

2:10 - 2:55

Using Metrics to Take a Hard Look at Your Code, by Jake Scruggs

3:05 - 3:50

Ruby Heavy-Lifting: Lazy load it, Event it, Defer it, and then Optimize it, by Ilya Grigorik

Break

4:20 - 5:05

Components are not a dirty word: modeling your Rails interface with stateful objects, by Mike Pence

5:15 - 6:00

Ruby Kata and Sparring, by Micah Martin

I recently purchased the Teva sandals pictured here, via Zappos (which, as a side note are fantastic…I’m a bare foot guy but some times you need shoes and these are the perfect solution). The browsing and purchasing experience was pleasant and easy, but it was the post purchase that really shined. I ordered around 4pm EST. They told me the shoes would arrive in 4 to 5 business days, but at midnight I received an email saying I had been upgraded to priority shipping and they would ship much sooner; no specific time was given. The next day my shoes were on the front door., and all without any shipping fees at all. Incredible. But it gets better.

After trying them on I realized they did not fit. They felt fine most everywhere but the poor little pinky toe was taking some serious, blister inducing punishment. So I visited the Zappos site to find out what my options were. I clicked on my order and it gave a phone number to call to setup a return. It was about 11pm EST and when I called someone picked up immediately. I only had to press one number; no long series of phone menus. The woman on the other end spoke perfect English and was patient and friendly. She set me up with a new pair of shoes, the next size up, to ship the next day, with no restocking fee, no shipping fees, and no return shipping fees. And, they shipped them to me without waiting for me to ship the old ones. She walked me through printing out the return shipping label (which I didn’t need, but welcomed simply because she was so patient and helpful) and told me to ship back the other ones in the original box with the new label. My new shoes arrived 36 hrs later and fit perfectly this time. I had 14 days to return the originals.

In every aspect of customer service and product quality Zappos got it right. It’s a lesson to all of us. They just sell shoes. No great online features. No creative products or services. No amazing innovation. They have a huge line of quality shoes, at normal prices (no discounts that I could see), but with free immediate shipping and triple A customer service, they stand out of the crowd. I know where I’ll be buying my next pair of shoes from.

I love hulu.com. Try if if you haven’t. My entire family uses it to watch TV. In fact with it, and some other video sources (Blockbuster.com, torrent and other net sites) our family is considering dropping cable all together.

Apparently hulu, written in Rails by the way, is on target to make $90 million in its first year. Way to go Hulu and congrats.

Full article here.