Ruby and Rails - Manchester, September 2006
Wow - after bolting back up from Reading where I'd been the previous day and night to Manchester I arrived at the North West's first Ruby on Rails day where I was lucky enough to be given a half an hour slot to make sure us Microsoft types had ample representation in the closed communities of the open source world ;-)
Unfortunately because I was traveling for the entire day I didn't get a chance to see any of the excellent Ruby and Rails sessions, however, from everything I've heard they were all absolutely fantastic.
The event was put together in little over three weeks by Andrew Disley, Dan Morris and Dave Verwer (he who has converted to the dark side) and they've all done a fantastic job. there were over forty people at the event which was held in the MDDA offices in central Manchester.
I was speaking on Watir and how it can be used by any web developer regardless of their server side background, I'm an ASP.NET man through and through and I'm using Watir heavily to test the applications I write, I'm even compiling my Ruby test into .NET just to be a show off. So I used the event to show how Ruby works side by side with the technologies we all know already, there is not need for a paradime shift in technological skills to use Watir or Ruby generally. All of the slides from the Ruby and Rails day are available here.
All the sessions were recorded with both video and audio and the organizers are hoping that they recordings will be available over the coming weeks, as soon as they are I'll blog about them and let you know.
The first of many events like this in the North west I hope!