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It has been a while since I had a good technical post on this blog, and this is will not be one either. Instead, just a few brief words on a very successful event for geeks in Copenhagen that took place last Thursday. Sponsored by Microsoft and co-presented by the Danish development community, Community Day 2009 Copenhagen delivered what it had promised: A day with free beer and food, interesting presentations and lots of networking across the usual technical boundaries. While the event, previously exclusively with a focus on Microsoft technology, was dominated by seasoned .NET developers, we, the Ruby crowd, was well represented as was the PHP programmers.

Daniel Mellgaard Frost, Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Denmark, had put together a diverse program where only two talks was devoted entirely to Microsoft technologies (Silverlight and LINQ), but six out of eight talks was about web development in some form. I did a talk on ActiveRecord, the O/RM of Ruby on Rails, and according to the many happy comment I got afterwards, it went pretty well.

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I’d never have guessed that the first time I’d visit Las Vegas, the gambling and the drinking, the shows and the shopping would be a minor thing, something that I’d squeeze in between what really mattered. But RailsConf 2009 had such a comprehensive and interesting program that this ended up being the case. From the casual networking at breakfast and lunch over packed keynotes and high-quality talks to late-night Birds Of a Feather sessions, RailsConf did give the attendants any reason to step out if the air-conditioned Hilton and into the sun and lights of the Strip.

We did that anyway, obviously, but mostly we were learning, tweeting, chatting, coding, emailing and taking notes at a conference where the wifi actually worked and power strips were easily available. I’m not going to reference all the talks that I went to here, but I have uploaded my notes here. Also, I’ve written a detailed summery of David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote and a few select talks that I attended for RailsMagazine, but the free PDF-edition won’t be available for another two weeks now freely available for download … slides from all the presentations can be found here.

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You have at least two chances to get introduced to Ruby on Rails by yours truly this year. I do a presentation on Rails with a focus on ActiveRecord, the ORM of Rails, on Commity Day 2009 in Copenhagen. I am also teaching Rails used with agile methods at Copenhagen Business School this fall.

Community Day 2009 is free 1-day event May 28 in Copenhagen sponsored by Danish developer communities. Besides my two cents, it also features presentations on Android, Flex, Air, Silverlight, LINQ, Drupal, jQuery and ASP.NET MVC - in other words it looking to be a lot of buzzwords and popular technologies explained. As if that wasn’t enough, the day also include three geek-friendly meals, friendly competitions and lots of free beer.

The course I will be teaching at Copenhagen Business School is called Agile Development in Practice, and builds upon a theoretic platform of agile methods. The course focus is on giving the students practical experience with Scrum and Ruby on Rails through a combination of traditional teaching and working with real-life examples. The course is free to attend for all Danish students, and counts for either 7,5 or 15 ETCS points. Others can also enroll in the course for a fee. The course description is not yet available on the CBS homepage, but I will link to here as soon as it is ready.

But before all that, I myself will hopefully learn many new and useful things about Ruby, Rails and all things geeky at RailsConf in Las Vegas. See you there? :)