The Ruby and Rails community is still growing strong and the sheer number of conferences coming up is proof of that. Below I’ve put together a list of all the conferences/events I could find before 2010 so you can hopefully make it out to at least one. ;-)

If you do attend one of these conferences, do me a favor and thank the organizer for taking the time to produce the event. Most of them spend a great deal of unpaid time making the event happen and most of them aren’t making a profit. Their passion and hard work helps keep our community strong.

There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process. Mechanics face something like this problem in the factory service manuals that we use. These manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, presenting an idealized image of diagnostic work. But they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you put the manual away and consider the facts before you.