Exceptional Blog

Hard to believe that it's been a week since we strolled into the Maritim hotel near Friedrichstrasse to bring Exceptional to RailsConf Europe 2008. The conference was really great, we met loads of fantastic people.

Everyone was really interested and supportive of Exceptional. Thanks so much to Geoffrey Grosenbach for giving us much needed encouragement, advice and awesome style. HUGE thanks to Jan Lehnardt for showing us around, organising the CouchDB meetup and even giving me a master class in CouchDB. CouchDB a super interesting database system, and I've already got a working prototype of Exceptional using CouchDB as its data store.

I also just want to mention how much of a gentleman David Heinemeier Hansson is. Let's face it, DHH made this conference exist by inventing Rails, apart from the overall contribution he's made to help bring Ruby into the mainstream. An interesting faux-pas of his was mentioning how he sat around a table at a modestly attended RubConf '01. David A. Black was quick to mention that it wasn't 2001, it was 2004. Which goes to show just how quick Ruby and Rails have become huge.

David is approachable, modest and just friendly. He was really supportive of our product and he was generous with time and conversation. One of David's main messages this year was: 'more people should contribute to open source.' He's definitely the kind of guy would give you the motivation to put stuff out there. David, thanks so much for your time, for your positive attitude and for Rails.

It was also great to meet way too many people than I can remember, but off the top of my head: Lena from Berlin, Pat (from Australia, of Riddle and Thinking Sphinx fame), Jon from Oxford, Craig and Nic from the BBC, Jonas from Scotland, Johan from Norway, of Gitorious fame, CJ from Sweden and so many others who were friendly, approachable and enthusiastic. RailsConf is so big that it can be intimidating, but everyone I met was just super cool.

Three things really stood out to me:

• The international element Sure, there were plenty of Americans, but from the small sample above, it's easy to see just how many countries are represented. This is a truly global community.
• The university-like atmosphere There's such an atmosphere of learning, of enthusiasm, of passion, but so concentrated and distilled. It's super infectious.
• The open-source connection It's awesome to meet some of the people who write and contribute to software that we use every day. Nothing quite as satisfying as looking someone in the eye and saying 'thanks'

I'm looking forward to next year's RailsConf, and definitely hope to get to a few more conferences in between.