Announcing RubyFringe

posted by pete on February 11th, 2008

It’s true: Unspace has been working on a secret project, and we can’t keep it under wraps any longer.

Without further ado, behold RubyFringe, “an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture.”

RubyFringe is a single-track indie conference with no paid technical sponsors and a target attendance of 150. It will run July 18-20th 2008, with roughly 10 speakers or panels each day.

We are positively overwhelmed with the response that we’ve received so far, prior to this first public announcement. Not only have people like Obie Fernandez, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and John Lam confirmed as speakers, but we’ve had something of a cult audience watching from the sidelines. At the time of this writing, we’ve had almost 200 emails added to the notification list. People are genuinely excited to hear about Merb, CouchDB, Rubinius, and IronRuby… and there are still speakers yet to be added to the bill.

Unspace really want to do something different with RubyFringe. We see ourselves as curators, and are actively sculpting the event in a direction that gives it more in common with David Bowie’s High Line Festival in NYC last year than the predictable “1500 dudes in a fluorescent-lit conference room” that we’ve all become so intimately familiar with. We asked ourselves if we could put on a conference that Zed Shaw would have a good time at. Sure enough, Zed is a confirmed speaker.

Daytime tracks will be hosted at the Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto. Rooms at a discounted conference rate will be available in limited quantity. Early-bird registration commences February 18th, 2008 at $650. We are planning nightly parties and uncharacteristically great entertainment, and several meals will be included. We are looking at this as an inclusive geek vacation with plenty of opportunities to network and socialize. All of this without a list of “Platinum Sponsors” bringing us coffee during the afternoon break.

Deep nerd tech with punk rock spirit!

So what’s next? Sign up to the mailing list on the RubyFringe site. With 150 attendees, the spots are going to go quickly. We’ll be updating the site and revealing all of the details over the next couple of weeks. Drop us a line at info@rubyfringe.com if you have any questions.

We are the RubyFringe.