1. The Davenport, FL area is terribly un-GPS documented. MS Maps, Google Maps, my GPS and Starbuck’s web site all gave incorrect directions to a Starbucks, a Walmart, and the conference hotel
2. Gregg Pollack makes awesome slides
3. Electricity is a rare and precious commodity at a Ruby conference
4. Ruby is playdough. Java is legos
5. Code Just in time, not in case
6. NeverBlock can be useful for more than just database connections
7. C/C++ can be inlined in Ruby
8. Even after 8 hours of Ruby classes, I still want to code until 2 in the morning

I leave later tonight for RubyConf in Orlando. This will be my first time at this conference and my second Ruby conference. I am so glad I gave Rails a second look two years ago, and enjoy every single day of my development in the language. I love the community, the syntax, and the focus on efficiency. I am enjoying working with more agile and creative small businesses and startups rather than bulky, procedural corporations. There’s more passion in this sector. So onto what I’m hoping to get out of this conference.

Goal-assisting Education
I love learning. There is always more to learn but, what I learn has to directly help me reach my goals for me to stay passionate with it. There are classes that I will attend that I believe will help me improve my applications, but what is also exciting are the classes that surprise you, or the extra tips and pointers you pick up outside the classes from the people you meet and the impromptu discussions.

Absorbing Optimism and Passion.
In my opinion, passion and optimism, founded on persistence and a desire to learn is the recipe for success. I’m looking forward to meeting those of you who absolutely love what you do. You love to code in Ruby. You love creating applications to improve the user’s life, solve the user’s problem, or entertain the user. Particularly, as an Entrepreneur at heart, I want to meet those of you who are optimistic and passionate about the businesses you are starting or have started.

Suggestion and Tip to presenters: If there is something you do not like about Rails or Ruby, then make a suggestion from a positive perspective on how we as a community can make it better. Sharing your frustrations and distaste for something is fine, but useless unless presented with a real solution. I have no desire to be doused in a pessimistic discharge. Criticism is great, but do it from a passionate and optimistic spirit and the community will grow as a result. Do it with negativity and pessimism and its like a cancer that can eat away at a community.

Meeting like-minded people
This goes right along with my previous point, but beyond just being around optimism and passion, I’d like to meet you, hear your plans, your dreams, your stories. Find me, if I don’t find you.

I plan to twitter my experience and may make some posts on here as well. Should be a great time.

I’ve been following the unique style of 37 signals for several years now and I believe they have come up with some very sound business practices, both in their direction as a company in developing web products and in how they promote a creative and motivational environment for their employees. In the interview I linked to below, Jason discusses many of these principles from trying to let each other work without distraction (avoiding meetings and working in the same room), to improving team collaboration using web tools (like Campfire), shortening work weeks, and streamlining development cycles.

Jason discusses his views of not needing Venture Capital, at least at the beginning. He discusses simple design, not watching your competition, not planning too far in advance, and not spending a lot of time up front designing and planning but instead doing and learning from the outcomes.

If you’ve listened to or read Jason or 37 signals in the past there isn’t much new here, but their thinking is so far outside the stuffy and constraining boxes of the Enterprise and corporate America, that you really can’t hear this enough. I hope it catches on, and I continue to try and preach the same principles and put them in practice in my own projects. I think many people instinctively recoil away from some of these ideas, but I urge you to resist the comfort of, “we’ve always done it this way…it must be working”, and instead consider the principles behind these ideas and the desired outcome of some of this new way of thinking and doing business. I’ve experienced first hand the flip side of these practices in the IT corporate world for the last 15 years. It never ceases to amaze me how every corporation does the same thing with the same results over and over again, including wasting employees time, working on large projects with huge complicated processes that burn time and money and burn out their employees, needless bloated meetings, emphasizing quantity of communication over quality, treating employees like worker bees or worse yet children by requiring them to be in a certain location at a certain time clearly showing them you have no trust in them, and by discouraging their individual thoughts and creative inputs.

I’ve worked with many employees with great potential who were figuratively bound and gagged, stripped of participation and thereby emotional involvement in the project, which demoralizes and prematurely burns out the employee. 37signals does exactly the opposite and you can see it by following the employees of the company, seeing the quality of their projects, and the passion the leaders of the team speak and write with.

Despite unemployment rates increasing across the country to the highest point in five years, IT unemployment is unchanged and is as low as it was in 2000/2001, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as referenced here (and shown on a nice graph.)

In the past IT was seen as a supplemental skill set. When income was high, business would invest in IT by hiring more IT employees, giving raises and bonuses, and spending money on more training, software and hardware. When low, the opposite occurs. However, many more companies today rely on IT for the entire business as compared with the past when IT was there to assist and create internal reports and other “nice-to-haves”. Now more corporations than ever actually make money from the work of their IT professionals and because of this they cannot cut them as easily as in the past.

As for Rails developers specifically, some feel the hurting economy will help Rails developers. As companies need more IT work, but have less operating income and less venture capital, they may look for shorter development cycles and outsourcing as opposed to funding large internal Enterprise applications often based on more time consuming and less agile coding frameworks.

Recently the FiveRuns blog shared their opinion:

Rails shops are built to do more with less. It’s part of our DNA to be more agile, more nimble, and more productive than developers using “legacy” tools.

They provide other reasons for Rails opportunities being on the rise, including the lower cost to deploy and host Rails applications.

eWeek.com reported David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails, as saying:

I think Rails developers are much better positioned to weather the storm as they generally stand for delivering more with less faster. It’s the traditional mainstream environments that are going to see much more pressure to deliver.

Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard, added:

A slowing economy will likely lead to constrained IT budgets. There’s a good chance this will have a positive impact on the uptake of open-source options, such as Linux, Ruby and Rails.

Read the linked to articles from above for more opinions on why Rails developers should continue to see lots of opportunities. At the recent Tampa Brigade Ruby meetup it certainly sounded as though there was more opportunity than there were developers, and I’ve heard the same thing from several Tampa Bay recruiters now. Let’s hope it stays that way.

What has your experience been so far?

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