Obie Fernandez is attempting to put together a conference for (Rails) business entrepreneurs at the moment, and I wish him the best of luck with it.

One aspect that really stands out, however, is the price tag. Obie has asked people to state how much they might be willing to spend, and gives options up to $5000:

Registration price is probably going to be a minimum of $2000 since I would like to book a great venue with top-quality food, conference facilities and amenities. Speakers may receive discounted or waived registration depending on the amount of support we get from sponsors.

Now, I’m familiar with the justification that conference price tags are easily offset by increased client revenue, but that doesn’t automatically mean that conferences should be expensive.

Obviously my opinions are quite clear on this subject, but it’s worth reiterating. All a conference really needs to do is gather people together in the same space, and provide a set of tools sufficient for them to share ideas. Those tools might be a projector and whiteboards, could be wifi, or could just be loads of free beanbags.

I don’t go to conferences because I want to stay in a luxurious hotel, or eat sumptuous lunches. I do that anyway, but on my own time ;). This is not to say that I want to be sitting crossed-legged on a splintery floor and eating gruel for lunch, but I think there’s a balance to how much of the typical conference trappings we actually need and are worth paying for.

Anyway

This isn’t a rant against Obie’s idea - the conference sounds like a great idea, and having launched into that vague sphere myself recently, I would certainly like to pick the brains of the kind of people he’s looking to attract. I just don’t know if I could ever justify paying $5000 for it, and I wonder if setting the price so high will result in many smaller business-people finding it difficult to attend.

[snip 'comments' cannot be found]

Obie Fernandez is attempting to put together a conference for (Rails) business entrepreneurs at the moment, and I wish him the best of luck with it.

One aspect that really stands out, however, is the price tag. Obie has asked people to state how much they might be willing to spend, and gives options up to $5000:

Registration price is probably going to be a minimum of $2000 since I would like to book a great venue with top-quality food, conference facilities and amenities. Speakers may receive discounted or waived registration depending on the amount of support we get from sponsors.

Now, I’m familiar with the justification that conference price tags are easily offset by increased client revenue, but that doesn’t automatically mean that conferences should be expensive.

Obviously my opinions are quite clear on this subject, but it’s worth reiterating. All a conference really needs to do is gather people together in the same space, and provide a set of tools sufficient for them to share ideas. Those tools might be a projector and whiteboards, could be wifi, or could just be loads of free beanbags.

I don’t go to conferences because I want to stay in a luxurious hotel, or eat sumptuous lunches. I do that anyway, but on my own time ;). This is not to say that I want to be sitting crossed-legged on a splintery floor and eating gruel for lunch, but I think there’s a balance to how much of the typical conference trappings we actually need and are worth paying for.

Anyway

This isn’t a rant against Obie’s idea - the conference sounds like a great idea, and having launched into that vague sphere myself recently, I would certainly like to pick the brains of the kind of people he’s looking to attract. I just don’t know if I could ever justify paying $5000 for it, and I wonder if setting the price so high will result in many smaller business-people finding it difficult to attend.

[snip 'comments' cannot be found]

Obie Fernandez is attempting to put together a conference for (Rails) business entrepreneurs at the moment, and I wish him the best of luck with it.

One aspect that really stands out, however, is the price tag. Obie has asked people to state how much they might be willing to spend, and gives options up to $5000:

Registration price is probably going to be a minimum of $2000 since I would like to book a great venue with top-quality food, conference facilities and amenities. Speakers may receive discounted or waived registration depending on the amount of support we get from sponsors.

Now, I’m familiar with the justification that conference price tags are easily offset by increased client revenue, but that doesn’t automatically mean that conferences should be expensive.

Obviously my opinions are quite clear on this subject, but it’s worth reiterating. All a conference really needs to do is gather people together in the same space, and provide a set of tools sufficient for them to share ideas. Those tools might be a projector and whiteboards, could be wifi, or could just be loads of free beanbags.

I don’t go to conferences because I want to stay in a luxurious hotel, or eat sumptuous lunches. I do that anyway, but on my own time ;). This is not to say that I want to be sitting crossed-legged on a splintery floor and eating gruel for lunch, but I think there’s a balance to how much of the typical conference trappings we actually need and are worth paying for.

Anyway

This isn’t a rant against Obie’s idea - the conference sounds like a great idea, and having launched into that vague sphere myself recently, I would certainly like to pick the brains of the kind of people he’s looking to attract. I just don’t know if I could ever justify paying $5000 for it, and I wonder if setting the price so high will result in many smaller business-people finding it difficult to attend.

[snip 'comments' cannot be found]

Gem This

Most of the time, I don’t set out to write a gem.

But, sometimes, after a bit of time (which could be days, weeks or months) spent working on some code, I might decide that I have something worth making a gem.

It seems like many (if not all) of the existing gem-tools do some things that don’t really thrill me. Either:

• They add themselves as a dependency, meaning that when someone installs my gem, they must install the gem-tool
• They expect to be used at the very start of development, creating a directory structure and imposing opinions left, right and centre
• Despite the “bonus functionality” of automatically uploading a website and blogging for me, the obscure what’s actually going on

This doesn’t suit the way I work, at all. I don’t want to force anyone to download anything other than the code that is useful to them, and I already have my project set up the way I like. I just want to turn this library into a gem!

What I Want

My code is already there; it’s in an appropriate set of folders, and probably has existing Rake tasks. All that I’m missing is the ability to build the gem, maybe push it to RubyForge, and build the RDoc. Perhaps I’m storing the code on github, so producing a .gemspec file is good too. And, most importantly, I want to be able to hack it to suit each project, without any further interference or opinionation.

It’s simple enough to achieve this; all you really need is a few standard tasks in your Rakefile. So, I wrote a little tool to spit some fairly standard and easy-to-understand code into an existing Rakefile on my behalf. If I already have tests (or specs), it will produce a simple task to run those, and if there’s a bin directory it will hook that up too, but that’s pretty much it.

It’s called gem-this; fork at will.

It’s definitely not for everybody - I’m sure plenty of people get lots of mileage out of the existing tools and having a generated, standard structure for their gem code. I just don’t find it very useful, personally.