 My rails people welcome My fellow rails brethren welcome No, but seriously, honestly, you know, thanks for coming to the second annual access conference I hope if you I see a lot of familiar faces from last year And I hope you're enjoying the venue a lot more than the last one so Put that off there and really I mean without you guys coming You know, we would have no reason whatsoever to put this on it'd be kind of boring if it was me Only so thank you all very much for coming today and Someone that I also really want to point out our sponsors, you know Times are not exactly the easiest right now companies are coming back and all of our sponsors You know really Really helped us out by you're making this entire thing possible. So a big thank you to them, especially Our platinum sponsors engine yard new relic and AT&T interactive New relic in the engine yard are both here out there So please go and talk to them and say hello and find out what they got so also Real quick about new relic a new relic has a free trial of their rpm gold Product and if you put in the code a AC 2009 then you'll get a free 30-day trial of that Also, they've told me that they will be having drinks at the bar and you have to bring your access conference badge But then you'll be getting drinks. So go and have some fun and then we'll have lightning talks a little later So come in. Oh, yes. Thank you. When is a good question, which is? Pretty much right after yeah right now Is there ever a better time than right now, right? Isn't there? No, it's gonna be after the keynote. This thing probably about 630 or so is when that'll be So also a little bit about me. Yeah, my name is Robert Dempsey I'm the CEO of ADS where rails development shop here in Orlando and You know, I put this thing on with my co-chair Jason Cartwright if you are thinking of doing a regional conference yourself Get one or more people to help you because it's it's a hell of a lot of work And so if you have a team, it's a lot easier But you know what I want to do is tell y'all a story and the story starts off with a couple developers and You know, they're going through their day-to-day development practice using certain tools And they start having problems with those tools that they're using they didn't like the way that this specific app worked they didn't like the workflow that it imposed on them and It was lacking features that they felt were really critical for the way in which they worked and they knew that they can improve it And so they did in July of 2006 They launched this application the entire thing was built using rails That's a big thumbs up right there and they immediately started getting feedback from users Which is a highly critical Component for when you actually put something out there in April of 2007 They had their next major release of the application And then they were adding features practically on a monthly basis on their blog You can see it's just all these features one right after the other one right after the other All based on user feedback in December of 2008. They added a new member to their board It was the first person that they had hired on Since they started the thing so it started with two guys Right now it's only three right very small shop and last year they moved their entire platform to Amazon EC2 to solve their scaling problem and that story is the story of unfuddle which is a Project management system and that you may or may not be aware of great stuff So you might be thinking okay great. Well, you know, what does that have to do with access conference? So We had a couple goals with the conference in general and then this conference this year in Specifically what we really wanted to do was set the tone for the coming year Generally also Florida and February is nice So I apologize for the weather I'm talking with the man about that see if we can get that worked out Friday and Saturday are supposed to be better from what I'm told but you know, we really wanted to show What's new? You know, what's the newest stuff in the rails world and then what's coming up? you know, what can we look for in the future and this year the theme that we wanted to do are at least Have in the conference was maintaining a competitive edge and I would say the rails that's competitive and I would say that rails itself is competitive because rails is Continuously improving and this is one of the things that David talked about during the Q&A It's improving performance wise usability wise adding all of the internationalization features and much more and then I'm really looking forward to the integration of Merb with rails also to see what comes out of that because I like both and I think a combination of the two depending on how It's done can be pretty badass But you know, so what does this really mean for us? It also means that we ourselves must improve and there's a few ways that we ourselves can improve It's going to conferences like this reading books coding, you know reading other people's code This out there and also if you look look around the room, you know at everybody this here even Thank You Jason And we have a hundred and thirty people here and What I feel is a fantastic speaker lineup And there's a wealth of rails programming knowledge here And I really urge you all to take advantage of that one of the biggest takeaways that you can get Besides all of the the really technical information that comes out of a conference is making those connections later if you are You know if you're a freelancer or looking to get more work that way or if you end up saying hey You know, I'd like a full-time job or whatever You know the the connections that you make in rooms like this can really help you out in those cases So you talk with the your fellow attendees and talk with the speakers also And when I started going to rails conferences I was really worried about talking to the speakers because I put all these guys like way up here on pedestals I know the first time that I went to rails comp and I Attempted to actually say something to DHH. I'm like, okay You know, this is the guy that has allowed me to create a business that can sustain myself and My employees, you know, what what do I say this guy and end up being like hi? I'm Robert Debsey Rails is awesome and then I left so yeah, try and be a little bit more conversational than that It's my suggestion But also, you know, I want to I want to challenge you all and my challenge is this You know ideas themselves are nothing without action And I'm sure that there are a huge amount of y'all out there with a lot of ideas of what you can do and I would Really challenge you within the next six months, right? So it's a relatively alright time for me. We can guess I'm done in six months You know release an app release a Ruby gem or release a rails plugin I mean, I know that y'all can do it and as a little example of what you can do with very little resources Is this kind of a shameless plug? This is expense. This is an application that I built and the way that this came about I didn't even have the idea for this application. We were working with marketing consultant this guy's on Twitter continuously He saw a sales guy on Twitter complain about having to enter in Expenses using a spreadsheet and he was saying, you know Spreadsheets are really a pita and I have to send them and they suck So my marketing guy said he saw this and he comes to us and he says hey You know, can you build an app that can kind of make it easier for people like remote teams to enter expenses? And I said sure and when I looked in what I found out it was a common problem I spoke with someone earlier today and they said their company has you send in spreadsheets for You know for expenses and to me that's ludicrous because of what we can do with the web. So What I did was I wrote the user stories I worked with our designer Erica Greco who is awesome and then I coded it up So one okay developer being me one designer in two weeks We went from basically having an idea to launching a 1.0 site Up and going and we just did it and so now after a couple months We have 704 accounts enough customers to pay our hosting costs. And so for me, that's success I mean if we have really anybody using the damn thing that I wrote then I figured that that's you know That's highly successful And I know that if I can do it. I'm damn sure that y'all can do it and I think one of the Which actually takes to our next slide just do it, you know All you really need just like the unfurl guys is a desire to change something and then the will to make it happen That's it. Yeah, you can build something you can put it out there And then what you do is you let your users drive it. So that to me also is the secret I mean, it's the question to what is this? you know, what should I build because I'm always thinking okay, well, how can we make money etc, etc you know, what should I build how can we charge it for that etc and Really if you start and David has talked about this a lot too I mean base camp kind of solved one of their own problems rails came out of that and look at the success They have now took more than a year to get going But they did it and he sat down and he just coded the damn thing up and look where they are today So, you know put yourself out there talk with other people get ideas Because a lot of us in this room might have the exact same problems as well And then it just takes one of y'all to actually code up an app and then you already have a bunch of users and another myth and this is people that run shops or Freelancers and well, I'm sure have heard this one where customers come and they say, you know We need this entire list of requirements in an application and that's Most likely not true and the statistics show that most of the stuff that someone thought they might need ends up Actually not being used whatsoever or so prioritization is a good thing But that's another talk altogether the point being is that, you know make something basic get it out there Get people using it and then let your users drive it and that makes it easier for us Because it's like, okay if I start with this base set of features I don't have to think of every possible way that someone might use my application Let me get it out there see how people use it and then nine times out of ten it could turn out completely different Then how you thought people might use it in the first place So, you know take my challenge and press us with what you can do and help us by solving the problems that you find as well Thank you So just a couple of cleanup items to probably a little late And I think I emailed everybody the hashtag for like flicker and Twitter and all that good stuff is the AAC 2009 if you're not on the event view site everybody that Registered should be on there if you're not let me know because you can like privately message other people Through the network, and I can't even see you know who you're trying to talk to or what you're saying to them So I will be professional at all times And the tiny URL is being able to follow the the live Twitter feed that's going on as well So our next speaker is John Larkowski from hash rocket, and we'll be right back with him. Thank you