GoRuCo was the largest gathering of Ruby developers on the east coast! The event was awesome and took place at Google NYC. I want to personally thank Google for letting us use the space and provide the free food/drinks/etc. The venue was amazing and had a variety of speakers.
The event was liveblogged by Bryan Helmkamp; JP Reardon also wrote an overview of the GoRuCo. The event also had a nice list of sponsors including Engine Yard. Engine Yard is a full ruby on rails hosting company that focuses on the hosting for you, so you don’t have to. Many of the larger known ruby on rails hosting companies like slicehost, just give you a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and expect you to maintain/update/fix it. Engine Yard takes care of that for you, so you can focus on coding. I got a chance to meet the founder, Tom and hear all that they are doing to host/support rails developers.
I also got a chance to meet some great people like Geoffrey Grosenbach of Topfunky who is the man behind peepcode. Peepcode is a website that sells screencasts (Video of your monitor with a voice over explaining what their doing) focused for ruby on rails developers. I know I have watched many peepcodes and it was almost funny because he is the voice in them (So weird cause when I was hearing him talk and was like OMG he is the voice behind the magic screencast.) I also meet Jay Phillips from codemecca who is the project manager be hind Adhearsion. Adhearsion combines Ruby with Astrisk the open source PBX system. Both of these guys were really cool and wicked smart, Jay is only 19 years old!
GoRuCo was awesome event, the only thing that I thought was odd was they had a paper survey? Isnt it 2007AD and not 2007BC? Why not post up a link to a survey online? You could password protect it from the outside and just announce the password. (Just my 2 cents.) I hope to see this happen again next year and continue to attend!
Customised Post It Notes
I’m glad you enjoyed GoRuCo, John. Since I guess since I’m the data whore behind the surveys and other information gathering attempts, I should probably give you the reason for paper surveys. When I sent out a pre-conference survey, I found that only about 1/2 of the attendees responded to the surveys. Although this is pretty darn good, we thought of different ways to get good feedback from our attendees while it was still fresh in their minds. If I gave you a link during the conference, there is always the chance that you won’t answer it until quite a bit after the conference or you would totally forget about doing it.
In retrospect, I got about the same level of response from the paper survey as I did with the online version which means in the future, I’ll probably go with an online version. (less transferring of data!)
By the way, we did have an online version of the same survey (link was printed on the survey).
Thanks for the response Abhay.
I did not even see that the paper version had a link to an online one, but I am glad you got a large responds from the paper. In retrospect thinking abou it, it makes sense, especailly handing it out at lunch and then following up and staying there to hand them back in. I noticed not everyone was online and checking out the liveblogging. I think some of it had to do with lack of power strips, but I am glad you got the response.
I hope to see more at next year’s GoRuCo, Keep up the great work!