Conferences, Asterisk, Rails, and More Conferences

Since leaving odeo i’ve been hitting the conference circuit. I guess it’s a reaction to being heads down in the bowls of a startup for a year and a half. This week i’m at AdvocacyDev III, talking about rails, telephony, and best practices in web development to a group of developers and activists within the non-profit-industrial complex. It’s fun to get back to some of the projects i was doing just before odeo. Last week i was at OScon where kellan and i hacked up some calendar foo for folks. Before that we were both up in Seattle at CATS the Cascadia Anarchist Tech Skillshare. I was going to go to the indymedia techmeet in Brazil, but i was feeling conferenced out. Back in June gaba and i went to the first big rails conf, it was loads of fun to meet the other caboosers and started working on a book about Testing Rails for O’Reilly. I got to escape my normal tech patterns when i popped in on Where 2.0 and saw all the the cool geo hacking happening. My summer conference spree started at the Z Magazine organized week long radical vision gathering which produced a network, the International Project for a Participatory Society of radical thinkers. We were trying to advance ideas of radical political theory and concrete vision for better world.

The whole process has inspired me to get off of my butt and submit talk proposals to some upcoming conferences. Given that i’m working on two books in between my conferences, one on Rails and the Asterisk Cookbook, i figured i’d combine them in my talks.

• Rails Conf Europe: Integrating Asterisk and Rails: Using Ragi & DSL’s
• Astricon: Integrating Ruby on Rails and Asterisk

If you’re a woman hacker, then you can also catch gaba talking about similar hackery with asterisk at the Eclectic Tech Carnival in Timisoara, Romania. The rest of the ETC event is pretty cool, combining radical politics and rebelling against the male gender dominance of the larger free software world.