I'm pleased to be able to announce that spikyblackcat and I will be appearing at RailsConf Europe 2008 in Berlin. This is the third year in a row that we've managed to secure a speaking slot so we must be doing something right - although I've yet to figure out quite what!

This year we're scheduled for 11:35 on the morning of September 3rd where we'll be talking about rolling your own dedicated Ruby clients for HTTP applications using the Shoes toolkit and whatever else we can fit into the forty-five minute runtime. We'd like to show a browser-based SproutCore equivalent as well but I suspect other commitments will get in the way of my relearning javascript in time, and there's also backend technologies which will be competing for time.

I really would have preferred to do a tutorial session, but those are very difficult to come by - not to mention that a sustained two hundred and ten minutes of the pair of us would probably have a very negative effect on the nerves and sanity of our audience...

Aside from the presentation we're also making plans for a BoF session to follow on from last year's creative madness. These are a great opportunity to test out ideas with a small group without the usual formalities and we're currently deciding whether to go with a security theme or maybe discuss some of our ideas related to democratising the internet.

Then of course there's the current top-secret project bubbling away in the labs, which would make for a fascinating hands-on session. I'm keeping very quiet about that, but as goth_twiglet can attest I've done more coding in the last three weeks than in the rest of the year before that: much burning of the midnight oil and - shockingly - a fair number of earlyish mornings too.

Tags: public appearance, rails, ruby
the music in my head: Cat Bash-Faster Pussycat-Whipped!