Rails Underground takes place 24-25th July in London at the Royal National Hotel and features many of the famous faces of the Rails world and a few new ones too. I understand there are a handful of tickets still available, but you’ll probably have to be quick!

Rails Camp UK, organised by a Brightbox customer (the enigmatic “Mr Jaba”), will be taking place at Margate Youth Hostel on 16-19th October. Rails Camps are, according to the site…

a posse of like-minded ruby hackers on a country retreat with zero internet for a weekend of fun. You’ll laugh, hack, learn, cry (well, you probably won’t cry… but you know… it felt poetic) and most likely play a crap-load of guitar hero.

As always, there’ll be plenty of our famous T-shirts at both events :)

John, David, Rahoul, Caius and myself will all be travelling up to Edinburgh for the event – so please come and say “Hi”.

Of course, never fear, we’ll bring plenty of our famous t-shirts and stickers :)

The time: Tuesday the 2nd September 2008, 9am CET.
The place: The Maritim proArte Hotel, Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.
The plan: Brightbox set up their booth and then have a leisurely stroll around Berlin, taking in the sights, sounds and Bratwurst, before a good night’s kip and a fantastic exhibition at RailsConf Europe.

That was the plan. Unfortunately KLM conspired against us. A two and a half hour journey rapidly expanded into a twenty three hour marathon, involving unidentifiable hotel food, a detour via Paris, lost luggage, hysterical, smelly geeks, truffle cake and “luxury” mojitos. We were also without Neil, who bravely volunteered to stay in England installing a load of new hardware in our new racks.

RailsConf Europe is pretty much the biggest Ruby on Rails event on our continent. We were told there were about 800 attendees here (although RailsConf US in Portland, earlier in the year, had twice as many). With that in mind Brightbox stepped up to become gold sponsors of the event, providing us with a booth between ELC Technologies, a global agile development shop, and Five Runs, the Rails profiling tool, who we know quite well.

We didn’t get the chance to see many sessions, but there was a pre-conference Q&A session on Tuesday evening with David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), Jeremy Kemper and Michael Koziarski. It was interesting to hear DHH praising 37signals’ Xen virtualisation setup (this being the platform we also currently use), later on I chatted with him and explained how we’re working hard to get a production-ready Rails stack included with Ubuntu; which will help when setting up your servers, even if you don’t choose Brightbox.

DHH also opened the conference proper on Wednesday morning with his Keynote on dealing with legacy code. This was interesting to me as, like most developers, I am often overwhelmed by the urge to rewrite code that I wrote a few months ago. This was followed, later in the day, by Jeremy Kemper talking about performance improvements – in particular the new features in Rails that make use of the facilities that HTTP provides.

Overall, however, the consensus seemed to be that the talks were solid but uninspiring (apart from our very own Rob Lee with a talk on semantic markup, dressed in a Brightbox t-shirt).

At the booth things were mental – especially in the first break. All the free Brightbox t-shirts vanished in less than ten minutes, as did the “I love Ruby” stickers. However, our giveaway was nowhere near as good as ELCs – they had free beer!

We did meet some of our existing customers (a few for the first time in real life) and a lot of prospects. Interestingly, at least from our point of view, we saw a lot of interest in our Managed Cluster services (where we build and maintain a high availability cluster of boxes for you).

An evening out with a load of our friends from Yorkshire (the aforementioned Rob and Deb, Louisa, Paul and Charmagne) ended my involvement with RailsConf (I had to fly back early because my babby was starting school) but John and Jeremy stayed on till the very end.

Overall, the travel was horrible, the food was great (I had the best burger I’ve ever eaten at a hotel just off Friedrichstrasse) and the conference was good. Berlin is a magnificent city and we had a fantastic time with some old friends and made some new great new ones. So that’s our story – how was it for you?

So, if you’re going, make sure to pop by our booth and say “hello”. The event also falls around our 1st “official” birthday (we have several – a bit like The Queen), so we’ll likely be buying drinks one evening. It’s not all work, work, work you know.

We’ll also have plenty more Brightbox t-shirts to hand out.

At NWRUG we’ll be doing a presentation about setting up Brightbox and some of the highs and lows, ins and outs of building a Ruby-related tech business oop north. After the event we’ll be heading to The Paramount for drinks, so come and say hello – we might even buy you a drink (or two if you’re a customer :)