This conference is huge... there are 1,600 Rails coders here... it's a bit bigger than my more familiar No Fluff symposiums. I'm fairly certain I prefer the smaller conference, but this place is a Who's Who in the community. I've already run into Mike Clark, Glenn Vandenberg, Justin Gehtland, Erik Hatcher, Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Nathaniel Talbott, Matt Bass, and more. I stood three feet from DHH. :) I'm running into people I met at RailsEdge in Reston and tons of people from my local Ruby User's group... the concentration of smart people here is just mind boggling.

Last week I was talking to a friend and was reminded how many people who work for companies that won't send anyone to a technical conference. Let me say that if you think your team members know everything they need to know, then by all means, keep them chained to the desk. But if you want your developers to get some new ideas, to learn what's coming next and prepare your product to take advantage of the new innovations, if you want to them to get excited about working with Ruby or Rails (or whatever your language of choice is), then get your team out and at the conference. Give them a chance to get new ideas and get excited. Then they'll bring those ideas and that energy back to your shop.

Anyway, I got a cell phone snapshot of Chad Fowler with his ukulele and a guy on the accordion... They were rehearsing a song they did for the evening keynotes. :) I'll try to post it later if anyone is curious.