Ruby Hoedown 2007: Raleigh, one track and a charity workshop

The first Ruby Hoedown ran on 10 and 11 August 2007 in Raleigh, North Carolina, hosted by the Raleigh.rb user group and billed simply as the South’s Ruby conference. It was a two-day, single-track event in a borrowed corporate auditorium, and almost every decision visible in its programme is one a small regional conference still has to make.

When and where

The conference took place at the Red Hat headquarters building at 1801 Varsity Drive in Raleigh, on the edge of the North Carolina State University campus. Sessions opened at 1:30 p.m. on the Friday and closed at 6 p.m. on the Saturday, a day and a half of programme rather than a full two days, which let people arrive on the Friday morning without losing a night of travel at either end.

A corporate auditorium is the classic regional-conference venue: one room, a fixed number of seats, no rental fee to recover through ticket prices. It is the arrangement that makes a free or near-free event possible in the first place, and it is why the programme below has a single track and no parallel sessions to choose between.

One room, one track, no choosing.

The programme

Eight sessions ran across the two days, with two keynotes bracketing them and a lightning-talk block on the Saturday morning.

Two things in that list are worth noticing. The talks are overwhelmingly practitioner subjects (a web framework, a telephony library, game programming, C extensions) rather than surveys of the language, which is what a room of working developers turns up for. And the Saturday lunch was scheduled at an hour and three-quarters with short self-organising talks running through it, so the longest break in the day doubled as the least formal part of the programme. Both patterns are covered from the organising side on the conference organising page, and the lightning-talk block has its own page under lightning talks.

The charity workshop

Before the conference opened on the Friday, a separate half-day workshop ran from 9 a.m. until around noon: Ruby (and Rails) Testing Techniques, led by Marcel Molina, Jr., Bruce Tate and Chad Fowler. Admission was a minimum donation of fifty dollars, and the stated arrangement was that all of it went to the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

The syllabus was a snapshot of what testing meant in Ruby in 2007: Test::Unit as the baseline that shipped with the language, the unit, functional and integration layers that Rails added on top of it, and then the tools that sat around them: RCov for coverage, FlexMock for mocking, RSpec for behaviour-driven specs and Selenium for browser-level integration tests.

As a format it solved two problems at once. It gave the conference a reason to open a day early without extending the main programme, and it turned a paid add-on into something attendees could justify to themselves and to an employer. Paid workshops attached to free or cheap conferences are still one of the few funding mechanisms available to an event that does not sell expensive tickets; the alternatives are set out under community versus corporate sponsorship.

What the first edition set up

The 2007 programme established the shape that the following year kept: a Friday-and-Saturday slot, a single track, keynotes at the end of each day rather than at the start, and an off-site dinner on the Friday evening in place of an organised evening programme. The 2008 edition moved the event to Huntsville, Alabama and handed the hosting to a different user group, which is about as clear a demonstration as a regional conference format gets that the event was not tied to one city or one organiser.

For how this edition sits among the other regional Ruby events of the period, see the regional Ruby conference index. For the mechanics of getting onto a programme like this one, the call for papers page is the starting point.

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