RailsConf 2006: Back, and Macs

(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)

I’m back from Chicago, where I attended the first international Ruby on Rails Conference, better known as RailsConf. Taking place from Friday, June 23rd to Sunday, June 25th, it was the largest single gathering of Ruby on Rails developers ever held. The vibe there was great — it was a mix of geek congeniality and collegiality at its best, mixed with a very palapable sense of “we’re onto something very big here!”.

Between the rather spotty wireless connectivity at the venue and the events that ran rather late for a conference of this sort, I haven’t had a chance to blog about the event until now. For the next couple of days, I’ll be posting notes and observations about the conference here on Accordion Guy and also on my work blog, Tucows Farm. There’ll be overlap between most of the entries in the two blogs, with the not-as-appropriate-for-the-work-blog stuff — such as the Tale of the Squishy Cows and the Overzealous Airport Security Guy in Latex Gloves — not going into the work blog..

---

The Cult of Mac at RailsConf

Geek conferences are famous for what I call “hallway gatherings” — clusters of people gathered together around power sources, chatting and working away on their laptops. During the conference, a scene like the one below was very common:

The fourth guy from the left is none other than Chad Fowler, one of the brain trust behind the conference, Pragmatic Programmers author and all-round good guy. The guy in the black shirt who’s two positions to the right of Chad is Adam Keys, the funny geek who invited me to play accordion at his presentation.

While the gathering shown above isn’t unusual, what is unusual is the concetration of Macs. Wherever you looked, you saw a PowerBook or MacBook. Glowing Apple logos abounded — it seemed that there were 30 Macs for every non-Mac laptop. It seemed that among those non-Mac laptops, most were running some distribution of Linux rather than Windows.

I’m not alone in noting the abundance of Macs: check out this blog entry, as well as this, this and this.

Here’s a video where I did a quick sweep of a hallway cluster’s laptops after finding that they were all some form of Macintosh computer [3.7 MB QuickTime]. It’s all “Mac…Mac..Mac…”

It’s another interesting chapter in the rise of the Mac among the not-quite-mainstream programmer crowd, a trend that first became apparent during the first O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference back in 2002. All through RailsConf, I was reminded of Tim O’Reilly’s remarks in his 2002 WWDC keynote, Watching the “Alpha Geeks”: OS X and the Next Big Thing.

The RailsConf Nonconformists

Seeing they were in the minority, Christian Metts handed out “Certificates of Nonconformity” to people sporting non-Macintosh laptops and took their photos. These RailsConf nonconformists were also photographed for posterity, and the photos have been collected in this Flickr set.

The most famous of the nonconformists was none other than the enigmatic Rubyist known only as why the lucky stiff, who posed in classic “why” fashion with his certificate:

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.