Mountain West Ruby Conference - Day 1
Day 1 of the Mountain West Ruby Conference is slowly winding down. Overall I’m happy with how things are turning out. From the coffee/juice in the morning, to the power-strips and ethernet cables (wireless sucks at conferences), the organizers have been on top of things and are making sure everyone is having a great time.
While it was great to cheer on James as he gave his well delivered talk, as well as Jade as he stepped up and gave an impromptu lightening talk, I don’t tend to come to these events for the presentations, but more for the hallway conversations, which have been great. I got to enjoy a great lunch with Tim, as well as many great conversations due to the small, intimate nature of this conference.
As far as the talks go, my favorite so far was they keynote by Chad Fowler. I read Chad’s book, “My Job Went to India”, when it first came out and was very inspired. His talk followed along a similar track and was equally as good. One of his biggest points is that technology comes and goes, and while we may be the pioneers of today we will easily become the dinosaurs of tomorrow unless we’re constantly challenging ourselves and searching for the next new technology.
The talk tonight, like the book, made me take a step back and re-evaluate my career and the direction I’m heading. While I love programming in Rails, I need to be very careful about getting to comfortable and allowing myself to be pigeon holed as “that rails guy”. As the Pragmatic Programmer suggests, you should be learning a new language once a year, but yet I have failed to do so in the most recent years. When I get home I’m going to spend some time evaluating the latest technology, and start committing to learning something new.
Tomorrow looks to be another great day with talks by the JRuby guys, John Lam and many others!
Comments
Matt says:
March 17, 2007 @ 03:32 PM
Ben Atkin says:
March 30, 2007 @ 04:26 PM