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Portland has been overrun with ruby and rails geeks this week. This was my first RailsConf (out of the three) and I'm really glad I took the six hour flight from Boston.

Most of the attendees are still truly interested in perfecting their craft and finding cool code to make their projects easier. I'm glad there were pure ruby talks, including a very good talk on meta-programming.

Sure, you could take the time to catch up on RSS feeds and new projects around the rails community from your basement but it isn't the same as being able to sit face-to-face with fellow developers.

Lots of us work in small startups where you may have one or two developers to bounce ideas off of. At RailsConf, just watching people live code is insightful on areas you can improve. I've been inspired (or compelled) to revive some small plugins and clean them up on github.

If you were at RailsConf but not following the twitter feed on summize, you were missing out. Instantaneous feedback was provided on all the talks (the good, bad, and ugly) along with where people were meeting up etc.

Also, interesting to note everyone uses Macs and iPhones (myself included). This is an interesting observation on a bunch of geek early adopters. Hmmm, what personal platform should you be considering?

I love conferences where it doesn't matter what you're wearing, how you present, etc. If you can code, you're accepted, if not hang out and learn... put up or shut up.

Some of the best presentations were actually the unorganized lightning talks. This is where you give people a chance to signup and present for 5 minutes the latest thing their working on. Matt gave one on rubber, along with some pretty interesting ideas on everything from testing, deploying, to hooking into SMS / Jabber, etc.

I've actually met a lot of Boston rubists out here as well... I guess it sometimes takes a plane ride to the west coast to talk to your local geeks.

So, overall a smashing success. The keynotes were hit-and-miss and some of the rooms were over crowded; but, the essence of geeks hanging out and talking passionately about code was preserved.

Excellent work to everyone who made the gathering possible.