MARTYHAUGHT

I’ve had a few blog posts at the tip of my fingers in June and never got around to getting them finished. Such are things when you’re incredibly busy. The last couple months have been crazy busy but in a good way. I’m now starting to catch up and decided I should give my blog some attention. The biggest reason for being so busy was RailsConf and my lean tutorial. Let’s start there.

RailsConf 2010

RailsConf was a great time. It was probably the best RailsConf to date. I think in terms of quality, social events and content it was tops. The very first RailsConf back in 2006 was so unique and new that it’ll hold a special place in my heart. I was fairly new to the Ruby community at that point that it was really hard to top. I won’t go into specifics about the conference though.

I will discuss my tutorial some. On Monday, I did a 3 hour tutorial on Lean practices. I knew it would be a lot of work but I ended up spending almost all my free time and several work days getting it all together. A good chunk more than I had planned for. The good thing about running your own business is that you can rearrange things if you need to. I also had a nice break between two large projects so that also helped. I know a lot of attendees got value out of the tutorial and there were the usual ‘haters’ that didn’t care for it. With such a niche topic there’s not much you can do about that. In hindsight and knowing some of the technical issues that the tutorial would face, I would have done things a bit differently. RailsConf didn’t record any video of the tutorials or normal sessions so the best I can offer up are my slides, here. There were some cool handwritten notes done by Jess Martin of my tutorial too.

mountain.rb

The most exciting topic for June was mountain.rb, the Colorado Ruby conference I’m organizing for October. I launched a single page website during RailsConf. The conference received an enthusiastic response and lots of questions about when we’d announce a call for proposals and when registration would be open. I’ve been working on the conference planning over the last few weeks trying to get those two things ready. First, we do have a conference hotel, Hotel Boulderado. Come late July we should have all the paperwork in place with a discounted room rate so those that want can book their room. I am just wrapping up the sponsorship prospectus and hopefully will have that available early next week. After that I’ll get the call for proposals written up and released. Finally, I hope to have registration open by August. I’m still finalizing the budget so until that’s done I can’t set the registration price.

Facebook Follow-up

If you’ve been reading my blog recently you’ll recall I mentioned a follow-up post for my Facebooker tutorial. Being busy has delayed getting this out for sure, but along with that the Facebook API is shifting greatly with the Open Graph release. Facebooker itself is changing, though it looks like they’ve make a new library instead of try to make the existing gem work with both apis. I still intend to finish the second post as I had already done 80% of the work. Ironically the good stuff, as I saw it, was in the second post anyway but I needed to give enough groundwork to make the tutorial complete. I would say look for it in the next week but who knows as mountain.rb has the higher priority on my free time right now.

What’s Next

Speaking of free time, I don’t seem to do a very good job at keeping that free. I have two conferences in August, BizConf and Agile2010. I have some work to do for my talk at Agile2010 and BizConf is just for me and improving my business skills. More importantly, family keeps me really busy during the summer. Between t-ball, swimming, getting to the mountains with the kids as well as simply enjoying summer, more of the daylight hours are pulled away from work. We have a wonderful vacation to South Dakota planned in July too. I wouldn’t change this though. Family time is precious especially because you only get one shot at spending time with your kids at this age. My oldest is 11 and it’s just zoomed by. Work will always be there and all it takes is setting and honoring the priorities in your life. I’ve had to tell several clients no recently as I simply didn’t have the time for them. It’s also the reason why other blog posts never happened. I love to share with you things I’m passionate about and might help you in some fashion. But it’s just lower on the priority list and that’s okay. With my conference speaking schedule almost done, I’ll have more time for other pursuits!

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