Next weekend I will be attending the Lone Star Ruby Conference in Austin, Texas. My work, DigiMedia, is sending 5 of us down there from Thursday to Saturday night. I am glad to have the chance to go and hear some panels on Ruby, Merb, and Rails. I am still new to Ruby and Rails but have been learning a lot of getting ready to write my first Rails app soon. I haven’t looked at merb yet but need to start as the next big project at work will use merb. I still have a lot to learn on Ruby but am looking forward to learning it and attending more conferences in the area.
This will be my first conference on any subject so I’m looking forward to it that much more. The other guys all know Ruby and have been using it for a little while now so I’m the newb of the bunch, but that is alright with me as I love learning and get excited over it. I remember when I first touched css and then when I first started messing around with php several years ago. I will of course be shooting video, in fact we are buying a Flip cam in a few days, so I plan to take it to try it out. It will actually be for my 5 year old son, but I’ll do some testing on it first.
If your going to the conference, here are the panels I’m planning to attend (note; these are just the panels where there are two at the same time): Friday, September 5
Javascript frameworks with Ruby
Care and Feeding of Ruby Developers
Creating Desktop Applications With Ruby on Mac OS X
Ruby in the Cloud
Saturday, September 6
Using jQuery with Ruby Web Frameworks
Resource-Driven Web Development With Waves
How Not To Build A Service or Ruby Anvil (still debating)
Merb: The Pocket Rocket Framework
Well I made it through the first week working at DigiMedia and I gotta say, I loved it. It is a bit of a big change from freelancing from home but I was expecting that. I love having to go to work each day and being around other developers and designers and working on larger projects. I spent most of this week in Photoshop cranking out graphics. The rest of the time was spent finishing a WordPress project that was already started. Fixing errors, setting up some new plugins, and other things of that nature. I got a crash course on their Ad Manager which is just massive and look forward to messing with it more and ending up giving a quick class on WordPress to some retail people. Overall it was a pretty good week and I think I will enjoy working there. Another plus with the new job is having to learn Ruby. As you know, I’ve wanted to for awhile but client work always got in the way. However, with most of the work at DigiMedia being done in Ruby this gives me a chance to finally learn it. I have some books that I’m going through and several people I can turn to for help if needed.
Besides starting the new job this month we will also be moving in the coming weeks. We are still debating on a house or apartment, either way we plan to rent. Between me just starting the new job and Melissa planning to change from online classes at Uni of Phoenix Online to local classes here at Midwestern State University for nursing starting in January we just aren’t sure what would be better for us. Either way it will only be for 2-3 years.
I am also attempting to finish my redesign. I posted a screen of it on flickr awhile back and got lots of great feedback. I have started coding it to WordPress and just about done with the main page but still have several things to do. The problem is client work is on top of my list right now and taking up most of my evenings and weekends so I’m having to make time for my projects which right now there just isn’t enough of. I would like to have it done by the end of the month. As next month is full as well between getting settled into the new place and taking a mini-vacation to Kansas to see Melissa’s grandparents.
