Sterling Rose Design Blog

Practical Tips for Attending a Rails Conference
Authored by Dana Jones
May 08, 2009 23:05
2 Comments
Tags: community RailsConf Rails

I just finished attending my first-ever RailsConf in Las Vegas, NV. It was an amazing experience that I’ll be blogging about a lot over the next coming days. I wanted to make my first post on the subject be a (long – sorry) list of tips and advice in case you ever plan to attend a similar event yourself. If you have tips of your own that you’d like to share please feel free to drop them in the comments section!

Bring lots of business cards. One of the greatest benefits of attending a conference of any type is the contacts you will make, and it’s easier for them to remember who you are and keep in touch if they have your contact information.

Take care of your feet. There is a lot of walking and standing, and the days are quite long. Wear very comfortable, well-padded shoes. Put your feet up when you can. If you can find a place to unobtrusively take your shoes off for a few minutes and stretch your toes, do! There aren’t many people who will think badly of you for doing so, and I say screw the ones who will!

Drink up! Finish your drinks before you try to get through airport security, as they won’t let you bring them through. I got stopped for a bag search on the way back home because I had a water bottle in my bag.

Don’t count on the conference food. It’s really luck of the draw as to what you will be served. We had nothing but bagels and cream cheese served every morning for breakfast, and box lunches for every midday meal. It got monotonous and boring and wasn’t all that great even on the first day. The snacks were actually much much better!

Be prepared for sessions. Do as much advance reading about the tutorials and sessions you want to attend as you can. The presenters are trying to give out a lot of information in a relatively short amount of time, and the more you know about the topic when you walk in the door, the more you will get out of the time you spend there.

Don’t be shy – talk to people! I know that it can be intimidating to just walk up to someone and introduce yourself, but that’s exactly what you need to do. Give your name; they’ll give theirs back. Ask where they’re from, who they work for, what they’re working on. You’ll be surprised at the connections you make. Maybe they work on an application that will fill a need you have on your own projects. Perhaps they’re in a similar field to yours and there are networking opportunities you can take advantage of. If you don’t ask, you won’t know where the happy overlaps are.

Treasure your downtime. Conferences are work – make no mistake about it. Between focusing on learning, working on code samples, meeting and greeting, socializing, and all of the other things that take place at a conference, you will wear out. I talked to a whole lot of people at RailsConf 09 and every one of them that I asked admitted to overwhelming fatigue at the end of the day. Take time to recharge quietly when and where you can – just listen to your own body and it will tell you when enough is enough.

You don’t have to attend everything. In a typical day, there were sessions that started at about 9am and ended at about 5pm. In addition, there were “Birds of a Feather” (or “BoF”) sessions that could extend well into the night. (I know of at least one that started at 10PM!) If you try to be everywhere, you’ll go nuts. Scour the schedule carefully and pick out those presentations you think you could get the most direct benefit from (whether in terms of education or networking or something else) and focus your attention on them.

Go to the keynotes. I missed several, including one that was reportedly horrible and one that was reportedly amazing, and I will always regret it. If it sucks, you can always leave, or you can stay and share in the collective battle scar.

Try to sit on the aisle where you can. Not only does this give you more room to spread out, it makes getting up and leaving or going to get some water a lot easier. In the case of RailsConf 09, it also meant you were more likely to have access to a power strip!

Stay hydrated. It’s easy to forget, when you’re so focused on the official events, but drink, a lot. Otherwise, you could get dehydrated, which leads to headaches and general grumpiness. And nobody needs to see that. :) Failing that…

Bring Tylenol. Get a little travel bottle of Tylenol or Advil and toss it in your bag or keep it in your pocket. Trust me on this one. Wouldn’t hurt to have a tube of Chapstick and a bottle of Visine handy, either.

Take pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Nuff said.

Don’t be afraid to re-ask details of someone you’ve already met. They probably don’t remember who you are or where you live or what you do, either, so they aren’t likely to be offended by a polite, “I know you already told me, so I’m sorry, but what was your name again?”

Be polite. Courtesy goes a really long way. Don’t cut in front of someone in lines (yes, it happened to me once). Don’t be loud and rude. Offer to plug and unplug power cords if you’re the lucky stiff near the power strip. Take your own trash to a receptacle (don’t be a pig-person). Try to be a part of leaving the conference organizers with an overall positive impression of the attendees.

Be prepared for things to go over your head. Most of the people that I talked to admitted to not understanding all of what a presenter was driving at. That’s ok. Take what you can from the discussion, and bully the rest.

Don’t try to make a work trip into a pleasure trip. Sure, you will probably have opportunities to go out on the town with other attendees (especially if you were conscientious about sticking your neck out and introducing yourself), but you should not make the mistake I did of thinking that you will have time to truly hang out with non-attendees at night. Schedule a separate trip for that or you will feel you are shortchanging yourself and others.

Plug in and charge up at every available opportunity. You never know when you will have to go hours (yeah, plural) with no power at all. Obviously, this implies that you should remember to bring power cords!

Tweet your impressions as you go along. Whether you think they’re important or not, people want to know what you’re experiencing. Other people at the conference might want to know if a session was worthwhile or not (bonus for tweeting nuggets of useful information you pick up at a session), and those who couldn’t make it want a chance to gain some insight into an event that – for whatever reason – they couldn’t attend. In the case of RailsConf, the event organizers were actually really good about monitoring the #railsconf Twitter hashtag and responding to problems they saw reported there. Well, usually. :)

Don’t plan to work on client projects while you’re there. Unless you ignore everything else I’ve told you about downtime and networking and attending useful sessions, you’ll be way too busy to try to write client code. In five and a half days in Las Vegas, the only client work I got done was to code the views for a photo gallery. :) If you do find yourself with some time to code, grab a friend and hack on something fun and new together. You’ll learn a ton and it will be a lot more interesting.

Get a laptop bag that evenly distributes the weight across your body. You can do this with either a sturdy backpack, or with a bag with a long strap so you can hang it diagonally across your chest.

Get into the Caboose Conference! Do the open-source contribution it takes (if you haven’t already) to be able to hang out in Caboose. Not only are the most-recognized people in the community in there a lot more than in the open venue, the best food and swag winds up in there. :) Plus, if you get stuck on some code you’re hacking away on, I can almost guarantee there will be someone there who knows how to help you, if only you ask.

I hope some of this information was useful for you, and I look forward to seeing you at a conference in the future!

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