**Please see my follow-ups on individual days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday**

RailsConf 2008, two words: passionate and fascinating.

I met so many people over the past 3 days who are absolutely in love with the work they're doing. I met pod/screencasters Gregg Pollack (Rails Envy Podcast), Ryan Bates (Railscasts), Chistopher Haupt and Michael Slater (Learning Rails), and Geoffrey Grosenbach (Peepcode & Ruby on Rails Podcast). Everyone's familiar with their work I'm sure, but needless to say their depth of knowledge and eagerness to help out and get others involved was amazing. I've got a whole list of tips & tools for podcasting and screencasting now and several friendly contacts to help me along the way. I met Evan Phoenix, Brian Ford, and Wilson Bilkovich from Engine Yard who are the lead developers of Rubinius. Their presentation was great and I feel like I have a much better understanding of why Rubinius is important and useful. And I'm actually itching now to get commit rights (it doesn't take much!) I also met David Chelimsky, fellow sports fanatic and RSpec guru. We had a really interesting 5 minute chat about the new story runner feature in 1.1 and I'm really excited to explore ways to integrate it into my development process. And that's just the tip of the iceberg! There are about 20 other people I had conversations with, learning about their projects, what tools they use, what they like (love) about developing with Rails, what they don't, etc etc.

And all of the talks were so interesting! There was a nugget or two (or six) of programming goodness in literally every talk I attended. I'll expand on the talks I attended in more depth coming up, but needless to say there wasn't a single striking disappointment among the bunch. They were all fascinating, which of course is a direct by-product of having so many people doing something they're so invested in and that's so much fun to do.

In Conclusion,

Can't wait for RailsConf 2009!