Posts tagged with: "ruby midwest"

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.

Ruby Midwest is an upcoming two-day, single track regional Ruby conference taking place in Kansas City on July 16 and 17. Today they announced their speaker list (including our own Michael Bleigh, a Kansas City native) and we’re happy to blog about our involvement with the conference. Intridea is sponsoring OMGWTFBBQ, a dinner at the conference hotel with Kansas City barbecue open to all attendees after the first day of the conference.

Catering will be provided by Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue (it’s delicious, trust us). So if you’re heading to the conference (with keynotes by Yehuda Katz of Engine Yard and Chris Wanstrath of GitHub) and you want to take a few hours, enjoy the best food Kansas City has to offer and socialize with your fellow Midwest Rubyists, RSVP for OMGWTFBBQ today!

More details will be announced as the conference draws near, but we’re looking forward to helping make Ruby Midwest’s first year a runaway success as a regional conference. See you in Kansas City!