Robby on Rails: Tag conferences

Business of Rails Panel at RailsConf 2007

Robby Russell — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:57:00 -0600

Trying to finish my book and running PLANET ARGON consumes quite a bit of my time… so when the RailsConf people announced that they were accepting proposals for talks, I opted to pass so that it wouldn’t distract from my sprint to finish my book. :-)

This decision was even easier for me when Nathaniel Talbot invited me to be part of his proposal for a panel of people that are running companies that specialize with Ruby on Rails. I liked the idea and the other people that were invited were all people that I greatly admired and respected… so I said yes. After all, so much of my time and energy goes into this stuff and there isn’t any doubt that I spend way more time on the business side of Rails… than in code these days.

I just got an email from Nathaniel to let me know that his proposal was accepted.

So, if you’ll be at RailsConf 2007 (US), come see me on The Business of Rails panel session.

The following people are planned to be on the panel.

Moderator: Nathaniel Talbott, Terralien Inc.

Panelists include:

Justin Gehtland, Relevance, LLC
Geoffrey Grosenbach, Topfunky Corporation
Andre Lewis, earthcode.com
Joe O’Brien, EdgeCase, LLC
Robby Russell, Planet Argon, LLC

I hope that you all send Nathaniel some great (and tough) questions… ;-)

RailsConf, day 1

Robby Russell — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:22:00 -0500

Rails and Database Schemas

This morning, David Thomas opened up the conference by pointing out three problems that Rails needs to solve. The one that hit home for me and my love of databases… especially monolithic legacy ones… was his first bullet, “Data Integration.” Natural keys, composites, automatic AR relationships with reflection, and non-database backends. He didn’t mention stored procedures… I’ll have to ask him about that. ;-)

Shared Hosting and Rails

I’m currently sitting in Topfunky’s talk, “Rails Deployment on Shared Hosting”. He had a few funny slides… yes… deployment on shared hosting can be painful. We’ve been working with our customers to ease this problem as much as possible by collaborating on the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project. He also suggested that people consider a VPS, which is a very viable option… if you have the time and patience to setup the server. The pains of regular shared hosting are a big concern especially if you have a mission critical business application. This is why we moved towards our Rails Business Hosting plans and are working out the details for yet another step above in terms of cost and reliability. Stay tuned for more details…

I’ll post more notes later…

A tough decision

Robby Russell — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 02:06:00 -0500

Due to some fairly complex personal issues that have surfaced in the past week or so, I finally decided that I needed to cut back on a few of my professional engagements. This morning I made the decision that I will not be able to speak at RailsConf. I’m still going and plan to have a blast but I haven’t had the mental capacity all week to finish preparing for the talk and it was causing me quite a bit of stress. We all have our limits and I decided to side with personal sanity. :-)

Chad said they’ll make it work out and I’ll be more than happy to talk about legacy integration with Ruby on Rails while at the conference.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m human and can’t work like a robot. ;-)

Canada on Rails: 50 seats left?

Robby Russell — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:43:00 -0600

I just heard from Nathaniel Brown that there are only 50 seats left for Canada on Rails! Both Jeremy and I will be speaking there… and if you were not able to get tickets to RailsConf 2006 to see us speak… then you should head up to Canada.

I hope to see you there… :-)

Speaking at RailsConf 2006

Robby Russell — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:24:00 -0600

While talking to a client in our office this afternoon… I glanced at my email and it seems that I got accepted to speak at RailsConf 2006! About ten minutes later… Jeremy said that he also got accepted to speak at RailsConf!

We’re also speaking next month at Canada on Rails. :-)

The title of my talk is… “Sneaking Rails through the (legacy) System.”

How are we getting there? By train of course!