A Cookbook.

I felt a little bit startled when I found an email in my inbox beginning with the words

Looks like we have some work to do..

———- Forwarded message ———-
Date: Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 5:52 PM
Subject: RubyConf proposal

Dear Mike,

Thank you for submitting a proposal to speak at RubyConf 2008! We’re happy to let you know that your proposal, “Components are not a dirty word: modeling your Rails interface with stateful objects”, has been selected for inclusion in the program this year.

Obviously, Mike submitted a proposal earlier.

Well after some chats and skype calls (I had to buy a headset to have calls with him exclusively!) we decided that a double-talk with both of us speaking would be perfect. Fortunately David Black agreed and pushed me onto the speaker list. Thanks again, David.

Back in the states…

After a couple of days in Orlando, FL with my good buddy Dan -who was my host in 2007, too- Mike picked me up and we went to Sarasota, that’s just a 1 hrs ride away on the gulf side of Florida. What a nice beach. I love it.

I had a great time with the Pence family: friendly, funny and perfect hosts.
We spent more time on having a coffee in the city, drinking beer on the couch, or listening to The Distillers, and less time for preparing slides for our talk.

And I even had the chance to spend the election night with real americans! Obama would have been my choice, too, if I wouldn’t be an alien in the states.

Wednesday night

Arriving at the Omni Resort Hotel on Wednesday evening, we instantly began proving our drinking skills. Our friend Sam from Kentucky really did a good job but unfortunately had to surrender late at night. Anyway, we had fun in the Omni Bar with all those Ruby freaks and the icecold american beer.

Thursday

Perfect weather - for a trip to the beach, not for a RubyConf, though. Being quite busy with finishing my slides I missed a lot of talks. I think we went to some China food restaurant with plenty of nerds in the evening, with all of us wearing the RubyConf 2008 badge.

Friday, showtime

Perfect weather - for a trip to the beach, not for a RubyConf, though. After breakfast I instantly continued on my slides. I wasn’t in a hurry but planned on bringing in some slides about the YUI widgets in Apotomo, which turned out a success.

After some short nap it was showtime! For some reasons I felt quite safe with Mike Pence being my talk mate and after he introduced cells (where he did a fantastic job) I had the chance to talk 40 minutes about Apotomo- which was real fun! Having an interested audience I really enjoyed my talk with ~120 slides, kicking in my new speed sliding technique.

About 10 questions to answer until we did it to the bar. We felt great after this talk, and even late night at the pool party outside prominent ruby personage like Kirk Haines confirmed their interested attendance during the talk, which was cool.

Sunny Saturday

Perfect weather - for a trip to the beach, not for a RubyConf, though. Had to sleep an hour longer than expected due to a funny party the night before. The last thing I remember is I met a guy called John from Portland, OR, and went up to the hotel room to grab some more beers. So maybe I decided to follow Sam’s example and simply fell asleep.

Mike drove back to Sarasota at friday so I didn’t had the chance to rock with him at the party.

Anyway, I spent most of my time at the hotel pool, hung around with John and some friends, and finally Dan picked me up for dinner.

Summing things up I had a great time at the RubyConf 2008 and met a lot of fantastic people. The talk with Mike Pence and the time we spent preparing it was awesome, an adventure I will never forget.

Downloads

• The components talk was kindly recorded by Confreaks and the video is here.
• Mike’s slides about the lack of components in Rails and the solution- cells.
• My slides about the stateful widget framework Apotomo.