This past weekend Rubyists from all over descended upon Kansas City (my hometown and new place of residence) for the Ruby Midwest conference. Headlined with keynotes from Chris Wanstrath (of GitHub fame) and Yehuda Katz (of Merb and now Rails fame), more than 150 Rubyists attended the single-track conference at the UMKC campus. Intridea was represented by four members, one talk, and by sponsoring a Kansas City Barbecue dinner for the first night of the conference.

Photo courtesy of peterpunk777’s Flickr stream of the event.

The OMGWTFBBQ ran smoothly overall and gave more than 120 of the attendees a chance to taste some of the best of Kansas City Barbecue from Jack Stack. In addition to some belt-loosening food, we held some lightning talks that included a particularly memorable talk by Jeremy Evans about “Singleton Classes of Singleton Classes.”

My talk focused on the emerging standards for automatic web app interoperation via the OStatus protocol (and through it the PubSubHubbub, Webfinger, Salmon, and ActivityStreams protocols). While the talk was high level, hopefully I sparked some interest in the attendees in learning more about these standards and possibly implementing them in their own applications in the near future.

We had a great time at the event and, judging from Intridea’s TweetSentiments Analysis, a lot of other people had a great time too.