Ruby Manor

Ru3y Manor - what you need to know on the day

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:22:49 +0100

Hi everyone,

Ru3y Manor is this Saturday (29th October)!

Schedule

You can see the full schedule below, or on Lanyrd. We’ve given each speaker a 30minute slot for their talk. There’s at least 10 minutes for questions between each talk and a couple of 15 minute breaks; one in the morning, one in the afternoon. The times above are “perfect”, but don’t assume that we’ll actually run to the 5-minute precision outlined. There’s plenty of wiggle room should things run over or under on the day.

We do aim to start at 10am sharp though, so please turn up on time.

“Registration”

Registration will be simple enough. We’re giving a list of all attendees to the security staff, who may ask you to sign in or tick you off that list (we’re not sure to be honest). They’ll direct you to the third floor where one of us will give you a name badge sticker and a wifi password. That’s it.

Keep your sticker safe as it’s probably how we’ll run the tab in the Aft3r Party.

Lunch & Breaks

We’ve left an hour and a half for lunch so you’ll have plenty of time for a sit down meal, should you so desire. If you just want a sandwich though we’re dedicating the last half hour of lunch for 5-minute lightning talks. We’ll have a list that you can sign up to on the day if you’re interested.

During the breaks, and throughout the day, you’ll be able to use the cafe in the foyer of the venue. We won’t be providing any drinks or nibbles during the conference itself. Although there will be money behind the bar at the Aft3r party.

Post-conference drinks

The pub for the Aft3r party is The Mason’s Arms on Devonshire Street. It does not do food (apart from crisps and nuts) - that’s why we’re starting at 19:30 to give you time to hunt out some dinner if you want it. Obviously the pub will be open so if you want to you can go straight there if you want, but we won’t release the cash-behind-the-bar until 19:30.

There are loads of great restaurants and fooderies around (try Charlotte Street!), so please do take the opportunity to have something.

Bringing your computer?

On the day, consider leaving your laptop at home. We’d rather you gave the speakers your full attention.

There will be wifi, but we can’t guarantee how effective it will be. You’ll all be given a unique username and password when you arrive.

Full Schedule

The schedule for the day is on lanyrd, but here it is again:

10:00 - 10:10: Welcome!

10:10 - 10:40: “Rails vs object-oriented design” by Tom Stuart

10:50 - 11:20: “Jruby on elephants” by Tim Cowlishaw

11:30 - 11:45: Morning break

11:45 - 12:15: “Is Eventmachine a worthy alternative to Node.js” by Andrew Nesbitt

12:25 - 12:55: “Programming With Nothing” by Tom Stuart

13:05 - 14:35: Lunch

14:35 - 15:05: “How hard can it be? — A refactoring battle story” by Jon Leighton

15:15 - 15:45: “The Joy of Text” by Sean O’Halpin

15:55 - 16:10: Afternoon break

16:10 - 16:40: “Don’t fear the lambda” by Paul Battley

16:50 - 17:20: “A random walk” by Ben Griffiths

17:30 - Thanks and good byes!

17:45 - Go get some dinner

19:30 - closing time: Aft3r Party at The Mason’s Arms

See you on Saturday!

- Murray, Tom, James

Selections end TODAY at NOON!

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:58:38 +0100

Hopefully you’ve all done this already, but if not, head over to vestibule and choose the proposals you’d like to see at Ru3y Manor on the 29th.

You MUST do this before noon today; at that time, we’ll freeze the selections, and reveal the results to the world.

As the schedule currently stands, there will be eight main presentations on the day, but this will all be explained later.

So - head to vestibule!

http://vestibule.rubymanor.org/selections

Ru3y Manor Tickets: Final Batch On Sale Now!

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:49:42 +0100

The final batch of tickets is on sale now. Go and get one!

To reiterate yesterday’s post: If your talk is chosen you get in free, but don’t rely on your talk being chosen as a way to get a ticket! Buy one now and we’ll refund you if you the community chooses to hear your talk.

What happens next

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:25:42 +0100

Ru3y Manor is only 23 days away!

Here’s what happens next:

If you contributed to vestibule we sent you a twitter DM on Monday with a promo code that you can use to buy a ticket. If you haven’t used it do so soon, as…
Tomorrow morning (Friday 7th) the remaining tickets will be available for anyone to buy without a promo code. There are 180 tickets in total, and at time of writing 116 have been sold, so there’s still plenty.
If you haven’t already, you should sign into vestibule and choose the proposals you most want to see. Your selections will be used to choose the agenda.
We’ll announce this agenda next Friday (the 14th) so that the proposers have plenty of time to write their proposals. Just like previous manors if your talk is chosen you get in free, but don’t rely on your talk being chosen as a way to get a ticket! Buy one now and we’ll refund you if you the community chooses to hear your talk.
The proposers can still use vestibule before and after the agenda is announced to flesh out their proposal text into more concrete outlines and solicit more suggestions for exactly what people do and don’t want to hear from them.
We’ll all meet on Saturday the 29th for an amazing day of Ruby.

Next set of tickets / Polish your proposals

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:39:02 +0100

The next batch of Ru3y Manor tickets will be available very soon, and as we have said, preference is going to be given to those who’ve contributed to the development of the day.

Contributing via Vestibule is trivial. It can be as simple as leaving a suggestion, or explaining your motivations. Your involvement is important all the way up to the 29th of October, and beyond, but it is particularly important right now.

After all, you don’t want to be a scamp for the rest of your life, do you?

Presenters: Polish your Proposals!

In the very near future we’re going to start selecting which presentations will be given on the day. Everyone is involved in this, and so it’s clearly important that you incorporated any relevant suggestions for your proposal soon. Hopefully most of you have been doing this already, but it never hurts to given them a final pass.

You don’t need to agree with every suggestion; in may cases it’s useful to disagree, because you can then explicitly say “no, I won’t be covering that aspect”, and that’s very useful information.

Finally, we know that some people who proposed can’t make it, and other proposals don’t actually have anyone who has stepped up to present them. If you have to pull out, please visit your proposal and click the “Withdraw” button at the bottom, to help streamline the selection process.

So, you have your orders; get to it!

Ru3y Manor Tickets: First Batch On Sale Now!

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:30:13 +0100

If you’re on the mailing list, you should know this already, but the first batch of tickets for Ru3y Manor are now on sale! Head over to the ticket site and get yours now.

We have no idea if these tickets will disappear quickly or not, but if they do and you don’t manage to get one, fear not. There will be more tickets available soon, and the very best way of ensuring that you get one is by getting involved and contributing to the day via Vestibule and the mailing list.

What is Ruby Manor?

In case you’re new around here, Ruby Manor is a one-day, zero-bullshit, fully-fledged conference about Ruby, the programming language.

It’s predicated on the belief that conferences don’t need a lot of the ceremony and cruft that they’ve acquired over the years. We don’t need swag. We don’t need fancy food. We don’t need grandiose keynote speakers. We don’t want to wonder why the ticket cost hundreds of pounds or dollars.

We just want to get together with like-minded people and share ideas.

…and “Vestibule”?

Vestibule is a tool to help us - the community - generate and prepare the contents of the day. Rather than an opaque Call For Proposals, we all develop and refine the conference programme in the open.

The idea is simple. You propose a presentation. Others will help you refine and focus it by making suggestions. You keep updating your proposal bearing those suggestions in mind, so that the presentation you give covers the most interesting and relevant topics for your audience.

Ru3y Manor costings

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:50:57 +0100

One of our points of principle in putting together Ruby Manor is that conferences should be as transparent as possible, from putting together the schedule to deciding how to spend the money.

With that latter point in mind, we’ve tidied up the Google Spreadsheet we use to calculate the total cost of running the ‘Manor, and therefore what price the tickets end up being, for your perusal and delectation! You can view and edit it here. That’s right - you can tweak the ticket price and number of estimated tickets sold to see how things might pan out.

It’s noted on the sheet, but we’ll repeat it here - we haven’t set the final ticket price yet. We’re just opening up the process so you can see how we’re going about doing it.

Announcing Ru3y Manor

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:52:52 +0100

One and all,

Rejoice! The Guvner will be opening the doors to the Ruby Manor once more:

http://rubymanor.org/3/

Date: Saturday October 29th, 2011
Time: TBC (probably from 10am-6pm)
Location: University of Westminster, New Cavendish Street Campus, London, W1W 6UW
Price: TBC (it’ll be in the ballpark of past Manors)

Like previous Manors (and perhaps in the future, all right-thinking conferences) the community will generate and shape the agenda by proposing talks they’re willing to give, and providing suggestions on how to shape the talks they’d like to hear. Unlike previous Manors, they’ll be doing it on http://vestibule.rubymanor.org/ instead of the mailing list.

Vestibule is where you, the attendees, will develop the talks we’ll eventually hear in October. It’s a simple tool; all you need is a Twitter login and the beginning of an idea and you’re set. Vestibule is also open source, and we’ll be building on it (perhaps with your help?) over the next few weeks. We’ll be in touch in a few days explaining the rationale for something beyond a mailing list for discussing talks this year.

For all peripheral conversation and questions about other parts of the Ruby Manor experience, the mailing list is where it’s at, and together with the blog and Twitter accounts, it’s where you can expect to be kept up to date with what’s going on.

Tickets will go on general sale at the start of October. There’ll be about 150 of them, so there should be plenty for everyone. That said, we want to make sure that the people who are the most involved are able to come. Therefore if you contribute to the agenda (or general experience) via Vestibule or the mailing list, we’ll make sure there’s a ticket with your name on it if you want to buy it. Finally, as with previous Manors, if you propose a talk that is selected you’ll get a ticket for free (or a refund if you’ve already bought one).

We’ll be in touch with more details as we finalize them. In the meantime, feel free to ask any questions and get collaborating on those talk proposals!

Cheers

Murray, James, Tom

"We still feel strongly about our goals, but Ruby Manor has always been about the community..."

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:47:00 +0100

“We still feel strongly about our goals, but Ruby Manor has always been about the community participation and more than just what we want from it. There is no wrong or right answer; we really want to know what you, individually, think. Your thoughts and ideas will directly influence what we personally will do with Ruby Manor.”

- From our email to the Ruby Manor community mailing list. Please let us know what you think.

Videos from Ruby Manor: Manor Harder are now available for your...

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:51:57 +0000

Videos from Ruby Manor: Manor Harder are now available for your viewing pleasure!

Live blogging the manor

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:38:00 +0000

Live blogging the manor:

Graham Ashton, the unofficial biographer of The Guvner, has written an excellent roundup of every talk given at the Manor this year. He did the same for last year’s shindig: part 1 & part 2. It’s even more impressive when you realise that he was typing these up during the talks themselves!

Good job Graham!

Local Info

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:14:00 +0000

View Ruby Manor 2: Manor Harder in a larger map

'Allo Chinas - Roundup #3

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:26:00 +0000

The latest from The Guvner:

So, it’s time for roundup #3. My bone’s are aching, so we must be getting close to the day I’ll let you all run amock in my Manor.

First up, here’s a plate of meat with all the current proposals and suggestions on it; I’ve marked up who made the proposal, how long they want it to be and how much interest there’s been in it. There’s a load of talk proposals on there which is great, but I need more info; most of you haven’t let me know how long they’re going to be so I can’t sort out the schedule if I don’t know the size of the bits going into it.

This doesn’t mean the rest of you get off Kiera Knightley though - you need to get involved and shape those talks and let me know which one’s you want to hear the most.

New proposals

Tom ten Thij: Cucumber and X-path
Tom’s thrown his hat into the ring with a suggestion about covering using xpath with cucumber instead of the more traditional CSS selectors. There’s been one bit of interest so far, but I figure some of you interested in the other Cucumber proposals might also be into it. Let Tom know what you think.

Chris Lowis: Graphing
Chris has suggested a talk that’s partially an update to a talk he gave at LRUG some time ago about R, but also about data visualisations and plotting / graphing libraries in Ruby. There’s a lot of scope here, what bits do you want to hear?

Matt Patterson: Applescript
Matt is proposing another update to an old LRUG talk, this time it’s about scripting OS X using Ruby. He’s mentioned covering MacRuby too, which there was some interest in for James Mead’s talk. Maybe they could collaborate? What do you think?

Andy: Kanban
Andy suggested he do a talk on Kanban, but there was some movement towards making it a panel / discussion. If you have a preference, or think you have something to contribute to a discussion (perhaps as a dissenting voice - “Scrumm Rulez!!”, “Waterfall 4 eva” etc…) then chip in here.

Richard Livsey / Bartosz Blimke : Mocking the web
Richard originally suggested this talk about mocking / stubbing HTTP APIs when developing, but then Bartosz said he had a gem (WebMock) that did something similar and he could talk about it. There’s quite a bit of interest, maybe we can get Richard and Bartosz to collaborate and cover exactly what you want.

Jakub Stastny : Rango
There was a talk suggestion about what we could learn from other frameworks, and this prompted Jakub to propose talking about his Rango framework which is inspired by Django. It’s quite new so I’m sure we could all learn something about it, but what parts do you want him to cover?

There’s also been a lot of discussion about the other proposals (you can find the links in the last 2 roundups - Roundup #2 and Roundup #1.

Now that we’re nearly there we’ll close submissions and choose the talks in the next roundup. So, if you have a proposal on the table, it’s time to work the crowd and get people interested, and if you have an opinion about some of these talks it’s time to unbutton yer lip and spill yer guts.

Right, I’m off the rub-a-dub-dub for a few cheeky tiddleys.

Toodle-pip.

Google Groups seems to be a bit slow in delivering his wishes, so you heard it here first.

Wotcha! Round up #2

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:29:30 +0000

The Guvner’s been back on the mailing list:

Wotcha!

Time for round-up #2 of all the bish-bosh on the mailing list. I’m going to try and give everyone a birds-eye view of how we’re doing building this ‘ere schedule, and call out some things that need a bit more eyeballing from you lot.

It’s great to see some of you getting stuck in, but it still feels like we have a lot of silent partners here, particularly those of you that already have a ticket. This is the week where you - yes, YOU - send an email. I insist.

Got it? Right you are then.

Proposals

Tom Lea - Rack::Cache Tom wants to tell us about using Rack::Cache, caching fundamentals, the problems with Rails’ own mechanisms and how to win in general. For a pretty detailed proposal, I’m gobsmacked that he’s had no responses. Anyone? Anyone at all?

James Adam - Gem That James is offering to talk about lightweight and unobtrusive ways to turn your project into a gem. Thanks to a bit of argy-bargy from you lot, he now knows to cover the pitfalls of specific alternative gem-making solutions (jeweler seems to be top-dog), as well as a bit of rabbit-rabbit-rabbit-rabbit about his own solution, ‘gem this’. He’s also offered to talk about building ‘gem’ commands, although that didn’t seem to stir anyone’s porridge.

Paul Battley - Secrets of the Standard Library Paul has offered to cover some of the often-ignored standard library classes, such as Forwardable, Set, Array#assoc, and pp. This proposal got some good feedback, but perhaps there’s a specific library you’d like him to cover?

Jason Cale - The Joy of Painting with Ruby Ever wanted to use Ruby to visualise data in pleasing (and perhaps slightly trippy) ways? Jason is offering to give us an insight into using Processing from Ruby, with a promise to avoid anything too ravey and focus on practical examples.

Jason Cale - Building cross-platform mobile applications with Rhodes Jason also offer to talk about this, but there’s been a conspicuous silence on his thread. Do we take it that the community has other preferences?

Thomas Koll - 3 things Thomas has offered to talk about three things: teaching newbies, ‘hyper’ authentication, and multi-domain whitelabelled websites. This has some positive feedback, but Thomas, you really need to break these out into individual threads so we can help you refine and clarify what each of these might mean. Get to it!

James Adam - Rip James wants to introduce everyone to ‘Rip’, which is not a replacement for Rubygems, but instead a different approach to solving library dependencies. It looks like we got a bit distracted by mentions of Bundler, but there is some interest in hearing about this. However, we need more feedback to take this proposal forward.

David Salgado - Crunching log data with Hive David can tell us about using Hive to sift through logfiles, and a sysadmin has expressed and interest, but David confesses that it has nothing to do with Ruby. If you’re interested in this, you need to speak up.

Matthew O’Riordan - Heroku and other Ruby hosting solutions Want to know about how awesome Heroku is, and why alternative suck? Matthew wants to tell us, but nobody has responded yet.

Julian Burgess - Symbol vs. String Ever wondered what the difference was, or when you should use one other the other? Julian has done some research and is offering to share his findings with a short talk. Again, no responses here yet…

Ben Griffiths - Ad Hoc Ruby Scripts (or: Forget Frameworks) Ben is offering to take us back to a simpler time, when Ruby was recognised as a powerful glue language for plugging other libraries together. There’s quite a bit of positive feedback for this one, but we’ve asked Ben to provide a little more detail if he can.

Almost Proposals

Matt Wescott - Generator Off the back of Paul’s suggestion, Matt offered to do a short one on ‘Generator’, along with a project he’s using it in called ‘Midibeep’. I would suggest that Matt breaks his suggestion out into a seperate thread, so that it can get a bit more attention. Alternatively, perhaps Paul can cover ‘Generator’?

James Darling - Archaeopteryx Harking a call for more non-web-based content, James has offered to explore Sr. Bowkett’s music generator on our behalf. James, if you’re still up for this, pop up a new thread. Everyone else - if you’re interested and James is willing, you know what to do.

Jason Cale - Rack Jason Cale has offered to give us another shot of Rack know-how, but I think he’s going to need some feedback to really develop this. What about Rack would you want to learn?

James Mead - Ruby GUI with RubyCocoa/MacRuby There’s been a cry for some content around this, and James Mead has suggested that he might be willing to answer that call. James mentioned some specific topics that his own experience could cover, but he needs feedback about what you might find interesting; only one person has responded to his offer.

Suggestions

http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_thread/thread/bc92f59aab58c2ee Some folks would like advice about how to organise their projects - where to layout files, whether or not to require rubygems and so on.

http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_thread/thread/e72a3de2a76f96cb What we can learn from Django/Seaside/other web frameworks - quite a bit of interest (if you sift through the conflated venue/ticket conversation, but nobody has stepped up and taken responsibility yet. Are you prepared to take this on? If so, start a new thread and explore how you might approach it with the community’s help.

Originally posted on the mailing list

Sounds like lots of you have been keeping shtum. Time to pull your fingers out and get posting feedback…

The Heart of Ruby Manor is the Mailing List

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:07:57 +0000

As we mentioned on the website, Ruby Manor is an experiment in putting on a conference.

The major part of that, for you, is that we want the content, and to some extent the on-the-day schedule, to be community driven.

In our experience the typical conference goes like this: Announcement, Call for Proposals, nothing, nothing, nothing, Schedule Announced, panic about what the hell you’re actually going to talk about (if your talk was accepted) or decide whether or not it’s worth the ticket price (if you’re not), Conference starts. We want to fill in those blanks.

If you have an idea for a talk:

suggest it on a new thread
listen out for feedback from the community
use the feedback to shape your talk
keep the discussion going, these people are your audience, use them!

When reading you should reply to these proposals with:

a simple “Yeah, that sounds interesting”
questions about an outline of the talk so you can make…
…suggestions to help the speaker shape the talk to cover what you are interested in
offers to help the speaker out

As it gets closer to the date of the conference we’ll start choosing the talks for the conference based on those with the most community activity and interest. So as both an attendee-speaker and an attendee-listener it’s in your best interests to use this group to make Ruby Manor what you want it.

Presenting isn’t hard; here is a quick primer if you’re stuck for ideas.

Ruby Manor will only happen if you get involved and steer it towards your ideal conference. Why not start today?

Yippe Kai-Yay it's the Ruby Manor 2 Roundup #1

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:39:38 +0000

This just in from The Guvner.

Wotcha!

Last year I got one of my boys to write summaries of the chatter on the mailing list each week, but he’s a complete muppet, so I’m doing it myself this year.

Here we go:

News

Tickets: I opened ticket sales last Monday, and you lot promptly snapped up so many tickets that I had to keep some (15) back to make sure that everyone who wants to speak will get in. Yes, I messed up by forgetting to announce the ticket sales on this mailing list, for which I apologise. Needless to say, when the remaining tickets are made available it’ll be announced clearly on this list as well as my twitter account and me old swampy bog.

Schedule: Just like last year, the schedule is up to you lot to fill. Check out the sketchy running order to get an idea of what I’m looking for. Last year there were 30 minute talks with a slot of 45 mins, 8 minute talks in 15 minute slots and plenty of time in-between for unscheduled lightning talks. This year I’ve pencilled in a similar schedule, but it’s not written in stone.

Speaking of filling the schedule, onto the topics. I break these into 2 types; a suggestion is a topic that one or more of you wants to hear about, but no-one has yet offered to give, whereas a proposal is a topic that someone has offered to give a talk on. Got it? Right you are then.

Proposals

Vanilla.rb

One of my boys, James Adam, offered to give a talk about his vanilla sort-of-wiki / sort-of-data-n-code framework (http://interblah.net/vanilla-rb)

Browser-level testing: Selenium, Watir, WebDriver etc. in real life

Martin Kleppmann has offered to give a talk about browser based testing. Sounds like it’ll be about techniques you can use regardless of which tool you use. A couple of people so far have shown an interest and tried to shape the talk. What about you?

Almost Proposals

Cucumber (there’s some stuff on this thread too)

Joseph Wilk and Matt Wynne seem keen to collaborate on something. The directions discussed so far seem to be: tips and tricks for using cucumber in the wild (patterns, etc…), why cucumber over “traditional” testing, a discussion about the internals: Ragel and the new protocol. Get on there and help them work out what to cover

Suggestions

Event Machine / AMQP

One of my other boys, Kalvir Sandhu, said he’d like to hear more about AMQP and Eventmachine and some patterns for using it more effectively. One other person is interested in the EM side of it.

Testing strategies

James Mead wants to hear a talk that discusses the different testing strategies available to us ruby developers. We have a trend towards integration only testing, we have mock heavy unit testing, we have no-mock approaches, we have test spies, test doubles, oh my! There’s certainly some meat here, one of you want to chew on it?

Misc

This thread contains a bunch of starter-for-10 suggestions from my boys James Adam and Murray Steele. They’ve suggested talks on:

MacRuby / RubyCocoa

Rack

Key/Value stores

Day to day ruby

If there’s any interest in some of these, start up a new Right Said Fred to discuss them.

So, that’s it for this round-up. I’ll chip in again next week with another, and every week until you lot invade my manor. Now, off you go and flesh this schedule out or come December 12th you lot’ll be listening to me tinklin’ the ivories and singin’ along to the Eastenders theme tune for 8 hours.

Stay lucky!

The Guvner.

Originally posted to the mailing list.

Ruby Manor needs YOU.

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:38:00 +0000

So now you’ve got a ticket, what next? Sit back and idly wait for sparkling Ruby brilliance to pour into your head? Tsk. You should know by now. With Ruby Manor, it’s not quite that easy.

Maybe you didn’t get a ticket? Don’t worry, you can still get in, if you pay attention to this.

You need to start thinking of what might like to hear at the conference, but more importantly, what you can talk about.

No - wait - don’t recoil in terror. Anyone can speak at Ruby Manor. There is no elite group of long-time speakers here, peddling their wares from conference to conference. You are the elite. You probably have no idea what you might speak about, but it’s actually much easier than you think.

Think about what you’re working on right now. Chances are that you’ve found (or maybe even built) a tool that you really like - that’s making your life easier. It’s your duty to share what you know about that tool or library. Maybe it’s Cucumber, or Shoulda, or MacRuby, or Redis… who knows. But chances are you know more about it than some people, and if that’s enough of a seed for a great talk.

Or, maybe there’s something that you keep meaning to learn about, but haven’t got round to using yet. Maybe that’s Treetop, or HTTParty, or who knows what else. This is the perfect opportunity to spend a bit of time learning about it, figuring out how it works, and then sharing that knowledge with everyone else.

Of course, it’s also useful to get ideas about what you might like to hear, which topics that you think are interesting, and should be covered. Likewise, providing feedback to help other people shape and hone their own presentation ideas is a vital part of the Manor process. But without actual speakers, we’re all going to be sitting in a room twiddling our thumbs.

Speaking at Ruby Manor affords you kudos among peers, and is great for both building your own confidence, and building the strength of our Ruby community. So, what are you going to talk about?

Wow.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:14:00 +0000

We sold out our main block of 85 tickets in a little over five hours. That’s insane! Thanks to everyone for your support so far.

However, if you didn’t manage to get a ticket, don’t despair. Your best bet to get into the Manor if you don’t already have a ticket is to help us on the mailing list, and suggest a talk you’d like to give.

We have reserved a block of 15 tickets to ensure that we can get everyone who is chosen to speak into the event. As the community selects speakers we’ll release these tickets if the speaker already has a ticket, or give them straight to the speaker if not. Otherwise, we’ll release these tickets to the public closer to the event; be sure to follow @rubymanor and this blog too.

We are sure that some tickets will become available as spares closer to the event - your best bet is to contribute to the mailing list to stay on top of when they might appear.

"Looks like I’m going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bought my ticket to ..."

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:15:27 +0000

“Looks like I’m going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bought my ticket to http://rubymanor.org/harder”

- http://twitter.com/tomafro/status/5362388972

Ruby Manor 2 - They say lightning never strikes twice

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:18:00 +0100

The Guvner just sent the following message to the mailing list:

Hi all,

I, The Guvner, am opening the doors to The Manor once again, and just like last time it’s up to you to fill my echoing halls with the sound of Ruby.

I’ll confirm the venue and date shortly, but a little bird tells me it’ll be at the start of December in central London. Last year, some folk had to brass nuts to suggest The Manor was a bit soft to be a real conference. It’s up to us to prove them wrong. It’s Ruby Manor 2: Manor Harder.

However, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. This mail is about the conference schedule, and how I (by which I mean you) go about filling it.

I was pretty happy with the process last year, so you can just read last year’s announcement again and skip straight to making a topic suggestion (something you’d like to listen to) or talk proposal (something you’d like to speak about) in a new thread.

Last time there were 3 guiding principles which are worth reiterating:

Affordability - I’m still cutting out all the cruft; bring your own clothes, food, stickers and free-pens, and as before; you’ll know exactly where our money is going, and you won’t need to sell your Roller to get in.

Transparent - Everything is still going to happen on this mailing list, but I’ll be making use of Twitter and a blog to provide summaries for the mail averse. I want everyone to contribute, in whatever way they can, to help whip the conference into perfect nick.

Relevant - Last year, this meant no war stories; this year I’m insisting on ‘no repeats’. If the talk has been given before, chances are that it’s available online already. Ruby Manor 2 isn’t a timeshifted channel for the other ruby conferences, so if you’re talking at the Manor I want you to talking about something novel and new that you really care about.

So there you have it. Ruby Manor last year was a success not because of me cooping you all up in a room one chilly Saturday in November, but because of all the effort that you lot put in the mailing list to shape what went on in that room on the day.

Now, get to it and give me something to summarise next Sunday afternoon.

Wotcha,

The Guvner

Interesting…