Summary: Marty is the organizer of the Boulder Ruby Users’ Group and Rocky Mountain Ruby Conference. He’s been programming Ruby since 2005. Charley has been programming Ruby for about 6 or 7 years and doing IT for about 15 years. He got involved with Watir, which led him to Ruby. The Rocky Mountain Ruby Conference is held in Boulder and includes several hikes and other activities not normally included in a conferences. I’ll also be speaking at the conference. We went over the differences between the “Boulder Area” and the “Denver Area”. They’re 15-30 minutes apart, but culturally they’re pretty diverse. Boulder is small, but is becoming a startup and technology hub. Both Marty and Charley have been talking about the food experience in Boulder and they’re setting up the conference to be a great food experience as well. I asked if Marty and Charley view the community and regional conferences has changed after organizing a conference. Marty actually helped with Mountain West Ruby Conference. He also went into some of the challenges of picking a date and arranging the conference. He came up with the conference to get local people involved. They also went into how they work around repeated talks and whether or not they want them. Repeaters are OK, but you want a unique program and conference. We also discussed how talks are picked. How much weight the topics, speakers, and explanations get. The discussion finally turned to the venue, which is the historic Boulder Theater. It sounds like a terrific way to run a conference with some of the options they have with setting up the experience. Much different from the hotel based conferences.
