Started the morning off with a nice breakfast in bed; everyone has to try room service at least once in their life. Guidebook, an introduction to Ruby and Rails, began shortly after and was, like my boss, Mike, keeps saying, “Drinking from a fire hydrant.” First lesson learned: arriving half an hour early to a conference does not mean you’re early! There was a limited number of outlets available for charging laptops and wouldn’t you know it, me and the other 90% of people missed out. Fortunately, the presentation was more of a lecture style than hands on so it wasn’t a problem at all. Speakers were Dave Thomas and Mike Clark who put together a brilliant performance, very smooth and well laid out. Keynotes consisted of the basics of the web programming language Ruby, where Rails comes in, and general developing practices. 6 pages of notes later and a head full of code, I had a very good day and am dead tired.
One thing I am amazed about is the wide range of attendee ages and the equal amount of respect all are given. Every walk down the hall, I get nods from guys twice my age because who knows, it could be the young guy writing that next great app. Little do they know, I’m a front end programmer and know jack about what’s going on (shhhh ;)). Seeing so many young faces in the hotel is like being back at school, except the kids here are really smart.
Other than that, I got my badge and T for the start of Rails tomorrow and hung out in the flock of laptops eating bandwidth in the main foyer. The new MacBook is fitting in quite nicely and making lots of friends.