• Read more about Foster.ly - Where Fledgling Ideas Meet Entrepreneurial Authority

We're back with a debriefing on all the interesting stuff that happened at Saturday's exclusive Day of Foster.ly event.

The sold out event was held at the Artisphere, a posh urban arts center in Arlington, Virginia and was host to DC area's leading entrepreneurs, VCs and emerging startups.

Attendees were treated to a presentation from Aneesh Chopra, the first CTO of the United States, and an appearance from Congressman Jim Moran. The day's events passed by in a flurry as hundreds of entrepreneurs collaborated and innovated together through panels, study sessions, and parties.

Intridea's Managing Director of UX, Jurgen Altziebler, joined other development and design leaders on a panel where they shared insight on how to find and hire talent, how to work with clients, tips on project management, and how to get programmers and designers working together effectively.

Martin Ringlein, co-founder of nclud, advocated for hiring passionate people:

"When looking for new people, its all about passion, you can't teach that to people."

On the subject of project management, Jurgen shared:

"You can read all the books in the world about Project Management, but PM'ing is very much a human skill." - Jurgen

We really liked Nick Whitmoyer's advice to startups on logo creation:

"A lot of startups do 'styrofoam branding', where they get something for very cheap; it doesn't look good, and then it never biodegrades."

After an energetic day of knowledge sharing and collaboration between established entrepreneurs and fledgling startups, we were all treated to a night of live music and parties where many of us continued interesting conversations on technology, design, and strategy. We're looking forward to future Foster.ly events and to being a part of the innovation that's underway in the community of DC entrepreneurs.

• Read more about RailsConf 2012 - Evented Ruby vs Node.js

Hey RailsConf goers! You won't want to miss Jerry Cheung, co-author of (the just-released) MacRuby in Action book and Senior Engineer at Intridea present "Evented Ruby vs Node.js" Tuesday afternoon!

While Node.js is the hot new kid on the block, evented libraries like EventMachine for Ruby and Twisted for Python have existed for a long time. When does it make sense to use one over the other? What are the advantages and disadvantages to using node over ruby? In this talk, you will learn how to get the same power of concurrency enjoyed by Node.js while continuing to write in the language you know and love. Topics covered will include pubsub with redis or faye, building evented rack applications, and running evented applications alongside existing Rails apps.

Jerry will be in Salon K at 2:30 pm tomorrow.

Keep it weird, Austin Rails!

• Read more about UX Meets Ruby at MWRC

Nothing beats coding amidst a backdrop of mountains with snowcapped peaks, especially when it's done alongside some of the greatest and friendliest Ruby developers in the country.

I spent last weekend at MountainWest RubyConf with the goal of learning from some bright Rubyists and to present my new UXDD (User Experience Driven Development) presentation. This would be my first time presenting at a Ruby conference and though I was wrought with nerves, the inviting MWRC environment helped to put me at ease.

To my relief, my presentation was well-received. As many of you know, I came to Intridea as a designer and have gotten into development over the years as a way to bridge the gap between the design and development worlds. I was definitely nervous about giving a design-focused presentation to a group of Ruby developers who were infinitely more expert than I could ever claim to be; but I was humble and I think they appreciated that. The more time I spend in this community the more I discover how accepting it is and how ready people are to help you succeed.

Popular Topics

I attended tons of presentations and there seemed to be a couple overarching themes between most of them:

1. ActiveRecord and Rails Models: How do we organize the models correctly? The general practice is to move functionality from your controllers to your models, but when you follow that practice strictly it can create problems on larger projects. As someone at MWRC said, "the model gets too big to even get in through the door." So there was a lot of talk about breaking down functionality even further by taking all that functionality you throw in your models and breaking it out into even smaller bits of functionality, into classes or modules. Mike Gehard, David Brady, Jack Danger, and Mitchell Hashimoto all touched on the subject of how to refactor and maintain your model health in their presentations.
2. Ruby in the future: How should we be structuring our apps? What needs to happen to build "RESTful" or "REST-like" apps in the future? How should Rails be used as an API to serve a front-end client? Should Rails even be used to serve up an API?

Highlights

My two favorite talks were from Jamis Buck and Evan Light.

Jamis, who is someone I've always looked up to in the Ruby community, gave a fantastic presentation, "It's the Little Things", in which he highlighted a bunch of great "little things" that make Ruby so awesome. He's a fantastic speaker and was able to capture and engage everyone throughout his talk. He really had the group smiling when he referred to Ruby as "pixie dust".

Evan is another one of those people who I've seen in the Twitterverse for a long time, so being able to meet him and see him present was a treat. He gave a candid talk on "Frustration Driven Development" in which he talked about the advantages of getting angry, and how all of life's experiences can drive you to write great code. He was entertaining and his slides really convey his message, so check them out if you're interested!

The Humanity

All of the talks had a very human element for me. It was my first opportunity to meet many of the people who I previously only knew via their online presence. Now they're not just Twitter or Github handles to me - they're actually awesome people, doing really great work and making time to share it and talk about it with people like me. The Logan.rb group, based out of Logan, UT was a good example of some of the great people I met. They were extremely welcoming to me; I enjoyed meeting, eating, and hanging out with those guys.

MountainWest was such a fantastic event that I'm already committed to going back next year. Not only was the conference great, but Moab was beautiful too. I made sure to set aside some time to explore the area on my bike before I headed back to Baltimore.

This definitely won't be my last Ruby conference, and I'm thankful to the diversity of people who continue to make the community immersive and helpful.