Doing some scouring ahead of time, it turned out that I could get a pair of round trip train tickets from STL to KC for the astonishing low price of $110 for both of us and the ride was 5 hours (about 1 hour shorter than driving, the same if you stop for dinner). On the ride out, I started working on a side project I had cooking in my brain for the last few years and never dove on. So, I was on rails programming in Ruby on Rails.
We arrived late for the pre-conference meetup, but there were still a few souls milling around. I showed my app to a guy named Veezus and he made a comment on the design I was using and recommended snagging something from ThemeForest. Yeah, I have some lousy designs when I first start out I just get it working and put things in boxes to be able to tell what is what. That night, I dove through and found one I liked and implemented it during the breaks and presentations that I didn't have a strong interest in.
The presentations the first day were great. One that stuck out in particular was Jeremy Evan's topic of Classes and Inheritence. The topic reminded me of brainfcuk, but pushing limits is how you make yourself better. Later that evening, he did a lightning presentations on classes, singletons, and methods. It was nearly completely an academic concept he brought, the absurdity of the depth he dove in had the audience rolling with laughter. There you go bringing class into it again. I also got some more information on Fog and the part it plays on getting you into cloud computing with an extremely simple gem.
Day two was more laid back and attendance was slightly sparser than the day before. That is a story for tomorrow.
