This year I decided to go really light on my speaking iternerary - travel and slides prep is really time consuming, and I wanted to focus on things closer to home. Plus, three (!) talks at Railsconf kinda burned me out right at the start of conference season. But I’ve got a few event in the queue this fall:

My tech talk at Pivotal Labs, describing the Heroku internals and next generation app deployment in general. This talk was given last December, and we’ve added a lot of features since then - for example, we now have a binary gems solution. But the core architecture described in the video remains accurate.

CodeMash, coming up next month, is an unusual style of conference: its stated goal is to bring together programmers of different disciplines, to capture the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas and techniques between these diverse worlds. Though for all I know, perhaps the result will be hallway fist-o-cuffs between the C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python developers who attend. Either way should make for an interesting couple of days.

A few more chances for you to catch me in person:

• Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup, Sept 25 @ 7pm (this Thursday). My presentation is titled: Instant Rails Deployment to Heroku with Git. Heroku’s API and Git integration is our secret weapon, so I’m pleased to be giving a talk focused entirely on these tools.
• RubyConf 08, Nov 7 @ 1:15pm. Blake Mizerany and I will be presenting Lightweight Web Services with Sinatra and RestClient. Besides shamelessly pimping our respective open source projects, we’ll talk about why we think the future is all about small apps loosely coupled into a larger system.

Rubyfringe was great. Off-the-beaten-path topics, small size, tons of style, and countless small touches made it stand apart from the typical tech conference. (They included a Rubyfringe-branded condom in the swag, for gawdsakes.)

Whew, I think my brain has finally returned from its liquified state after Railsconf. Last year the conference felt like a vacation, since all I did was attend. This year, with all the speaking and booth-manning and meetings, it was pretty grueling.

Here’s my slides from Railsconf. More thoughts to come once I recover a bit more - it was pretty intense for my partners and I this year, what with doing three talks and manning a booth.

Places you’ll find me at Railsconf this year:

• Giving my talk about custom Nginx modules on Saturday afternoon. The talk has evolved quite a bit since I wrote the description, so expect some broader topics, like why I think HTTP is the critical enabling protocol in the era of Rails and cloud computing.
• Attending the Heroku product talk, in which we propose why you may never need to think about servers or hosting again. This is inconveniently scheduled immediately before my session talk, so I’ll have to duck out partway through.
• Signing books along with the other recipe contributors to Mike Clark’s Advanced Rails Recipes at the Powell’s Books booth at the lunch break on Friday.
• Hanging around our booth, where I intend to hack on Heroku and my open source projects, listen in on Geoffrey Grosenbach's podcast interviews, and meet everyone that stops by. So… stop by! :)

I’ve posted my slides from my talk rush, the Ruby shell and Unix Integration library, which I presented today at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.

In descending order of size (and, coincidentally, reverse order of chronology):

• Railsconf 2008, at the end of May. My topic is “Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks.” Even if you’re not specifically interested in Nginx modules, a lot of the talk will on my theory of how HTTP is the enabling protocol in the era of cloud computing. The significance of HTTP goes way beyond just serving web pages and web APIs.
• Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, on Friday, April 18th at 2:30pm. My topic here is “Cluster Management with rush, the Ruby Shell.”
• Cloud Computing Demo Camp, on March 24 (next Tuesday). I’ll be doing a quick Heroku demo and discussing a few implications of running on top of EC2, and how on-demand services in general are going to transform the landscape of IT infrastructure over the next few years.