Back from Railsconf - so refreshing

So last week I got to spend the better part of the week in Vegas. I am not much of a gambler but I will say, I love the vibe in Vegas and the food and entertainment are always good.

Railsconf is so refreshing. Everyone is there to learn and I am quite certain everyone left there with an enriched experience knowing more than when you got there and with a greater rolodex of likeminded colleagues.

What's truly amazing to see is a room filled to capacity with Rails developers (1200 or so) all on their macbooks, all connected and twittering in real time. This would make a great backdrop for the Twitter site, indeed,  this could replace the friendly ol whale graphic we have come to know (and not necessary hate) so well. Actually that's what is so cool about the Rails community. It's all about being open and honest, sharing and giving back. So if there is a bug in your software, it's ok to share that with the world, just tell them when it's going to be fixed and everyone carries on in their merry ways.

Most if not all Rails sites all have a personal touch to them, it's about communicating with your customers, seeing them as partners in the business equation.

The last keynote left me with the greatest impression, from which hopefully we can all learn. The address was given by Chris Wanstrath from GitHub. It was more about what he said than how he said it as he is not what I would call a charismatic speaker. He carefully compared the signup process on Source Forge to the signup process on Github. Hopefully they were listening. Essentially he was saying after you complete 3 pages of forms, select from a choice of 6 different open source licenses you still have to wait anwhere between 1 and 3 days to be approved before you can start sharing code. Github on the otherhand has you sharing code literally in minutes. I love how they were able to cut to the heart of the problem and do everything in their power to make that value stream simple and efficient.

We can all learn from this experience and hopefully start to simplify software interfaces in the way they have with Github.

Love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers
Jack