RailsConf 2006

I've been in Chicago since Wednesday geeking out with other Ruby on Rails developers at RailsConf. This is the first RailsConf and there are more than 500 attendees. So far many good times have been had and we're only on day two of the conference. Why the Lucky Stiff and the Thirsty Cups performed last night...awesome show. Very eclectic. :-)

Anyhow, so what's come out of it for me? Well first of all I launched Symphonious, a contract management tool built on Rails, by giving a five minute demo for a room full of people. You can use Symphonious to track your contracts from Pre-RFP through the proposal stage until (hopefully) the win and on to completion. It's simple but I think it will be effective for those out there that need to manage the contract lifecycle. At the moment it's pretty basic, collecting information about the contract and providing a workflow system for moving through the contract lifecycle. It also has contact management and sharing. There is definitely more to come though.

Also, after listening to Dave Thomas' call to action for 3 things he felt needed work in Ruby, I took to creating a simple extention to Capistrano which produces a Gem from your Rails app. I've requested to open a project on RubyForge, so as soon as that goes through I'll post the code there under an open source license.

That's it for now. I'm off to breakfast and another day of talks.