Ryan Carmelo Briones

So most of our (Stephanie and I) friends by now probably have heard that we are on the verge of becoming serious Harry Potter nerds. Yeah, it's true. We went and watched Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer on Friday night and there was an awesome Order of the Phoenix trailer that got us really psyched again. Fast forward to about 15 minutes ago. We're about ready to go to bed when an Order of the Phoenix "teaser" showed on TV. For giggles, and since I was already on my laptop, I decided to check out the Harry Potter website. To my amazement, I noticed on the bottom of the page, there was a link for Tickets and Showtimes. My heart jumped a little. So, in a little bit of unbelief, I started to follow the links to showtimes and ticket purchasing on MovieTickets.com to 12:01am, night of July 10th. And there they were. Quantity 2. Checkout. I was actually a little too lazy to buy them now because that meant getting up and going to the office to get my wallet, but Stephanie was going crazy with excitement, so I proceeded.... and so it was.

Does this mean we need wizard robes now? Hmm...

Well, I was trying to do the "cool" thing and blog from the conference I was at, but that didn't work to well. It'll just be easier to blog about it when I get back or when I'm in the airport or something. Apparently that was a no go either. So here I am, two weeks later. I have new things I want to post about, but I don't want to just leave it at what I put before. So, the shortened version:

• Quality of Speakers - Of what I saw, probably 90% were pretty bad speakers. There were some standouts, for sure. Robert Martin. James Adam. The Keynotes were good. DDH. Avi Bryant. Ze Frank was hilarious.


• Content of the Sessions - One of the things I was REALLY interested in was web application/desktop application hybrids. Apollo and sessions added on late, XUL and Slingshot. They all pretty much disappointed. Apollo, WAY too much funky code for a simple web app. XUL, not bad. Could look into them more. Can't remember what I didn't like. Slingshot, very alpha and kind of a weak concept. On top of that, I dumped some of the sessions that generated the most after-talk for other things or just plain old brain-rot.


• Overall Experience - Good. Portland was very nice. A little rainy, but the parts of the city I saw were great. The Saturday Market, which was also open on Sunday, was great! I got stuffed in 5 difference countries! Public transportation was a dream.

Would I do it again? Not unless somebody paid for it. Also, if I had to go to a conference that was more than $200 and not local, I would only go to generic conferences, like OSCON, the Open Source Conference. Diversity. I find it a bit hard to justify going to a conference on one technology, a very specific one at that, when I'm more of a tool for the job guy, as opposed to working for a company that's Rails specific.

So that's my RailsConf experience in a nutshell.