The Enspired Blog

Wow, it’s such a relief that the conference came off as such a huge success. This was the first time that Rob, from Rails For All, Naomi and I had ever produced a conference event. But apparently we knew enough to not only make it happen, but to actually achieve all that we set out to do. All the reviews circulating in the blog realm are echoing exactly what we had envisioned when planning acts_as_conference.

As with anything of this size and complexity, there’s plenty of room for improvement. We had some issues with the venue, such as spotty wifi and an obstructed view of the projection screen. But the staff at the Holiday Inn (Universal Main Entrance) was very responsive to our requests. Additionally, we need to provide more bottled water for our speakers and we really needed a little more room overall.

Again, I want to really emphasize how awesome our sponsors were. The team from Sun was around all weekend offering great support, amazing tool demos and some very exciting news about upcoming advances for Ruby/Rails thru JRuby and GlassFish. The Engine Yard crew was there providing great support information for common Rails issues, from performance to security and scalability. The guys from Unfuddle pitched in to help us setup the room Thursday night. They were hanging out in all the sessions and always available to lend a hand when needed. Less Accounting had a large presence and provided plenty of humor throughout the event. Rails Machine threw a cool party on Friday night where all the attendees were free to socialize, enjoy food and drink and win some cool prizes. I won’t mention everyone here, but not because the unmentioned sponsors don’t deserve it. I just don’t have time to cover it all.

Our speakers also delivered the goods. Our two keynote speakers were challenging, articulate and inspiring. Our overall goal was to provide both a wide breadth of topics as well as adequate depth in material. Our local community is fairly advanced in their knowledge, so the conference had to provide value for them primarily. We had great presentations on several extending technologies like Adobe Flex/Air and JRuby. We also had several different perspectives on Best Practices, Working with Teams, Teaching Technology and Test/Behavior-Driven Development. To drive the material deep, we had a couple in-depth talks on creating DSLs in Ruby, ActiveRecord and Adding Media to your Rails apps. I believe that our speakers were all top-notch talent with great, but sufficiently humble perspectives on what’s working and what’s not.

If you missed the first acts_as_conference event, you owe it to yourself to plan ahead for next year. There’s already talk of acts_as_conference 2009, right back here in Orlando, FL. Bigger? Better? It’s going to be hard to out do ourselves. Many thanks to those who attended this year… it was a success because the community made it possible.