4 Upcoming Ruby and Rails Events (MerbCamp, Great Lakes, Rails Summit Latin America, and Voices That Matter)

By Peter Cooper

It has not gone unnoticed that random announcements of individual events do not work well here on Ruby Inside. With events taking more of a local focus these days, it makes more sense to pool the announcements together. This post, therefore, is a rather uncelebrated launch of a new series of event-related compilation posts. Please make sure to post in comments if you have other events you want to mention or visit our Contact page.

MerbCamp - October 11 and 12, 2008 - San Diego, CA, USA

MerbCamp is an upcoming official gathering for the Merb community. Confirmed keynotes are by Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Yehuda Katz. The conference will take place in San Diego, California on October 11-12 on the UCSD campus. Registration is not yet open, but a mailing list is available. The camp is also looking for sponsors.

Great Lakes Ruby Bash - October 11, 2008 - Ann Arbor, MI, USA

The Great Lakes Ruby Bash is a general Ruby-focused event in Michigan. It's on October 11, 2008 - the same date as MerbCamp (above) and takes place on the University of Michigan campus at Ann Arbor, Michigan (y'know, where Kevin in American Pie went to college). The conference has its own Twitter account (@greatlakesruby) and they're still looking for speakers.

Rails Summit Latin America - October 15 and 16, 2008 - São Paulo, Brasil

The Rails Summit Latin America is an ambitious attempt at giving South America its own large Rails conference (a la RailsConf and RailsConf Europe). South America isn't an area that established conference players tend to head to, so Locaweb, a Brazilian Web hosting company, are bravely picking up the baton. Registration costs 300 Brazilian Reals(about $180 US) until September 8th, then goes up a little to 400 Real. The event takes place in October and speakers confirmed so far include Fabio Akita, Dr. Nic Williams, Chris Wanstrath, Chad Fowler, and lots of local speakers who it'll be excellent to see represented.

Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference - November 17-20, 2008 - Boston, MA, USA

The Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference is a Pearson Education event - Pearson are the team behind Addison-Wesley's Professional Ruby Series, headed by Obie Fernandez. The organizers say that the conference will "provide practical, people-oriented and in-depth information about using Ruby and the Rails platform to create dynamic technology solutions."

Obie Fernandez is the conference's technical chair, and heads an extremely solid speaker list including Ruby and Rails luminaries like Giles Bowkett, Thomas Enebo, Hal Fulton, Chad Pytel, Tammer Saleh, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and others.