Sebastopol, CA, May 26, 2009—RailsConf 2009, the annual event for the Ruby on Rails community held May 4-7 in Las Vegas, gave new and experienced Rails users practical tools for staying agile and competitive in an industry being transformed by fast-paced innovation. For four intense days, developers engaged directly with more than 100 expert speakers, learning how to exploit the popular framework's newest features to solve problems and build businesses.
RailsConf, co-presented by Ruby Central, Inc. and O'Reilly Media, Inc., is the largest official conference dedicated to everything Rails. More than 1,300 web developers, IT managers, web-based business entrepreneurs, and others gathered to learn the basics, catch up on the latest developments, and sharpen their expertise, through a variety of presentations and events arranged by Program Chair Chad Fowler and Associate Chairs David Black and Rich Kilmer. At CabooseConf, a free, parallel unconference, skilled Rails coders from all over the world met in one room to work on their Rails projects.
RailsConf is a unique opportunity for people who use Rails to meet some of the core development team, hash out real-world issues with them, and get their take on the future. The 2009 conference was set at an important crossroads in Rails development, with an upgrade and multiple enhancements just being completed and an imminent merger with Merb. Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, filled conference-goers in on plans for the upcoming Rails 3 version, and in a keynote address he discussed "Rails 3 and the Real Secret to High Productivity."
In other keynotes, Hansson conducted an on-stage interview with Timothy Ferriss of The 4-hour Workweek, and Chris Wanstrath of GitHub discussed the importance of sharing code, contributing to open source projects, and focusing on community in a talk he titled "How To Become a Famous Ruby Rockstar or Rails Ninja." Jon Crosby of Engine Yard talked about "Agility in Deployment – Rails in the Cloud," and Robert Martin of Object Mentor discussed "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too." A Rails Core Panel gave conference-goers a chance for a Q&A with key Rails developers, including Hansson, Yehuda Katz with Engine Yard, Jeremy Kemper with 37signals, Michael Koziarski of Koziarski Software Limited, and Rick Olson with ENTP.
This year's winners of the coveted Ruby Hero Awards, given to the unsung heroes of the Ruby/Rails world who teach, create, and contribute without recognition or payment, were John Nunemaker, Pat Allan, Aman Gupta, Luis Lavena, Dan Kubb, and Bryan Helmkamp.
Engine Yard chose RailsConf 2009 as the occasion to preview its new Flex service that gives developers new ways to access the benefits of Rails when developing for the cloud. Flex will be available on Amazon EC2 in June. Also at the conference, Blue Box Group and Gear6 announced a partnership to develop and deliver a Memcached-as-a-Service solution to all Blue Box Group customers.
Sponsors for RailsConf 2009 were Engine Yard, Heroku, Sun Microsystems, Blue Box Group, and New Relic.
For complete information on RailsConf 2009, including keynote videos, speaker presentation files, and photos, visit: http://www.railsconf.com
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