In a day or three I will be in Pisa for Rails to Italy where I am giving a talk on Ruby patterns in the Rails internals. Shout if you happen to be in the area and want to meet up, you know how it works.

Yesterday the three of us attended RubyEnRails 2007, a Dutch one day conference about Ruby and Rails held in our hometown Amsterdam. We had a great time meeting up with all kinds of Rails developers, almost Rails developers and entrepreneurs.

Nic Williams kicked off the conference being his Australian self and sporting his caboose shirt. In his talk he layed out his views on the future of Rails.

Norbert and I did a live hacking session with Ruby, we showed a few ways to clean up your Ruby code and a few ways to make it almost unreadable. I think we lost some people along the way, but I hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

One of the things that struck me at the conference was that the talks were really diverse, with lots of real world examples and live coding. As Geoffrey Grosenbach mentioned in his closing talk, this really gave the conference it’s own identity. I hope to see more of this in the future. Next stop, RailsConf Europe.

Geoffrey Grosenbach interviews Robert Gaal

On the right Justin Halsall

Eloy Duran and Nic geeking out after a talk

In a few weeks Manfred and me are giving a talk on Rubyisms at the Dutch RubyEnRails conference. From the site:

Norbert and Manfred take you on a journey along the coast of Ruby, where they try to uncover gems between the driftwood and seaweed while they steer clear of the word ‘metaprogramming’ with great dexterity.

If you’re in or around Amsterdam on June 7th, do come by. We’re looking forward to it!