RailsConf - Day 2

So the brainstorming continued pretty late from day 1 and eventually I slept pretty late with the promise of waking up early in the morning. Today was the first day of our booth right! Also I along with Denis, George had to record screencasts of the respective things that we had worked on. We had a 5 minute limit and my first recording was a disaster. It was a full 12 minutes long :)

The 2nd recording was agonizingly close to completion but I ran out of a precious few seconds before I could complete it, very frustrating. Eventually on the 5th try I was able to record a decent screencast. George is going to upload it and when its done I will share the url so that you all can check it out and see what I have done :)

We had good attendance to our booth. People were a bit confused about what we do exactly with Postgres and the Oracle spin on it. Also some wanted to know what exactly was the key differentiator in our RubyES stack. We had some interesting conversations with a guy from the Heroku booth who was using Postgres. In general there seemed to be a lot of curiosity and intent to use Postgres with rails app, which is definitely a good thing!

In the evening a company called as FiveRuns hosted HAPPY HOUR at a local pub, it was pretty crowded when we reached there, so we went to another place closeby. I kinda like the American food that I am getting to eat. Am also enjoying the different kinds of drinks too ;). Well they say, in America do as the Americans do! :)

We rounded up the day by dropping Marie off to the airport. She left ahead of us to go back to NJ. Had had very less sleep the last few days, so I snucked into bed at 9:45PM and got up at 6:15 am today morning. On to the oncoming day now :)

RailsConf - Day 1

I am/was kind of getting used to the jetlag back in NJ, but now Portland has added another 3 hours to the mix. Its 6:15 PM local time while I am writing this and am already feeling sleepy here.

In the morning, me and George were quite hungry as our last meals were just the burgers that we have had on the flight from NJ. After the breakfast, we headed towards the Convention Center where RailsConf is being run. We took the Red Train or something to reach it. Was pretty impressed with the infrastructure here in Portland. I mean this is a decent tram which takes you FREE OF COST across major portions of Portland. When does one think this will happen in India?

The convention center was pretty good and we attended some of the sessions/tutorials. The attendance also seems pretty decent this year around. We headed back to our hotel for lunch with Denis and Marie. And after lunch, we have been holed up together in a room working on our rails stuff and what all we plan to do!

The brainstorming is still ongoing as we speak, so I better get back to it, now! (still groggy though...)

Conferencing the Rails!

Conference time is here. I was supposed to go to the PostgreSQL conference, but am going to the RailsConf instead. Actually wanted to go to PGcon, cos that would have been my first and it would have been a great chance to meet up with all the leading lights from the community. Also Pavan was going to present HOT there and we had plans to check out Toronto and Niagara falls after the conference too. But couldn't go as I am working on some cool Ruby on Rails stuff and wanted to see how it shapes out during and after RailsConf. Right now am in my New Jersey ready to fly out to Portland by the evening. Its going to be a 6 hour flight! USA IS a huge country. I think India by flight from North to South tips wont be more than 3 hours. Thankfully jetlag has not afflicted me much and now the trip westward towards Portland might add some more effects :) Lets see.

SUNshine makes MySQL happy

Well, well, well... my last posting mentioned a link on slashdot where there was an announcement about MySQL mentioning intentions of close sourcing some of the stuff for their paying customers. As expected, there was a lot of hue and cry over it. Guess some in the PostgreSQL camp were happy rolling their I-Told-You-So eyes too.
It turns out that SUN and others in their camp have paid heed to all and again this link on slashdot says that they WON'T be close sourcing afterall. Interesting stuff this.. I wonder how many times companies have even been influenced in such an OPEN manner to do something of this sort. But GOOD I say :)