Ruby Hoedown 2008: Huntsville, and a format that travelled

The second Ruby Hoedown ran on 8 and 9 August 2008 at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, hosted by the Hsv.rb user group and sponsored by Engine Yard and Hashrocket. It kept the shape of the first edition: Friday and Saturday, one track, a keynote to close each day, and changed the two things a regional conference can change without becoming a different event: the city and the organising group.

When and where

Sessions ran in Room 107 of the Shelby Center on the Huntsville campus. Moving from Raleigh to Huntsville put roughly six hundred kilometres between the two editions and handed the work to a different set of volunteers, while the conference itself kept its name, its slot in the calendar and its single-track format.

That separation, the event as a format rather than as a committee, is what allows a regional conference to survive its founders losing a year to a job change or a move. It also sets a practical constraint on the programme: each new host inherits the expectation of the previous edition without inheriting its venue, its local sponsors or its volunteer list.

Same conference, new town, new crew.

The programme

Eight sessions ran across the two days, with two keynotes and three separate lightning-talk blocks.

The two keynotes were placed at the end of each day, as in 2007. Lightning talks appeared three times rather than once, a block on the Friday afternoon, a block attached to the Saturday breakfast and a third late on the Saturday, which is a scheduling choice as much as a programming one: short slots absorb the submissions a single-track conference has no room for, and they give first-time speakers a way onto the programme without a full session.

Two sessions are worth singling out for what they say about the audience. Rick Bradley’s flog << Test.new took an existing untested tool, Ryan Davis’s flog, and worked it into a specified, covered system on stage, by way of characterisation tests. Joe O’Brien and Jim Weirich opened the Friday with a mock dialogue over breakfast rather than a lecture. Neither is a beginner’s introduction to the language; both assume a room that already writes Ruby for a living.

Sponsorship, and what it bought

Engine Yard and Hashrocket were named as the year’s sponsors on the conference site. For a regional event the useful thing about that arrangement is its size: two companies, both from inside the Ruby ecosystem, covering the gap between what a low ticket price collects and what a two-day programme costs. It is the model described on the community versus corporate page, and it looks nothing like the tiered product a large conference sells, which is set out separately under sponsorship tiers.

What the 2008 edition shows

Read next to 2007, this edition is the evidence that the format travelled. The same two-day, single-track, keynote-at-the-end structure worked in a different state, with a different host group and a different sponsor pair, and drew a speaker list with national names on it, the founder of GitHub keynoted the Friday, and the director of Ruby Central closed the Saturday.

What did not change is instructive too. The single track stayed, the lightning-talk blocks stayed and grew, and the evening programme remained one off-site dinner rather than an organised social track. Those are the parts of a regional conference that tend to survive a change of city, and they are covered as design decisions on the conference organising page. For the wider set of regional Ruby events running in the same years, see the regional Ruby conference index; for what a first-timer walks into at an event this size, see your first conference.

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