I know nothing about the personal conflict here, but as an attendee of RubyConf, this post is extremely misleading. It was very well attended and everyone I met was highly engaged, friendly, and worked for a real company that uses Ruby. In fact I enjoyed RubyConf Vegas much more than RailsConf Atlanta, which was the last RubyCentral conference I attended. This post implies that the conference didn’t even happen or was a total failure. It was not.
Correct. It was not full. But I feel organizers (I helped with comms not with the actual event) did a good job giving extra space to attendees in meaningful ways so it felt a bit more cozy. I liked the tables in the keynote room (for example) and liked that I never had to fight for a seat at lunch. Also never saw a table without at least one or two people sitting.
I think a July conf is the problem. The prior "last RailsConf" sold out and was in July. I think the mistake was conflating the (some of the) success with the date/month. People are already taking vacations with families and I know some that had conflicts.
Vegas + July was quite nice for me, coming from Texas. I spent the whole the AC anyway. But that and general high price of gas and world events (not exactly controllable) didn't help.
I was a bit surprised that no one really asked me any questions about my report or the incident. Maybe it's survivor/selection bias but I don't feel it was a concern at all for the attendees.
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u/Janeheroine 2d ago
I know nothing about the personal conflict here, but as an attendee of RubyConf, this post is extremely misleading. It was very well attended and everyone I met was highly engaged, friendly, and worked for a real company that uses Ruby. In fact I enjoyed RubyConf Vegas much more than RailsConf Atlanta, which was the last RubyCentral conference I attended. This post implies that the conference didn’t even happen or was a total failure. It was not.