So a couple of us engineers and our CEO went up to Portland, OR for RailsConf 2007. Overall, it was a good conference and the whole list of “Who’s Who?” was there. We attended many sessions, but I liked JRuby and Solr the most.

RailsConf 2007 had over 1600 in attendance, so its pretty clear that the Ruby/Rails community is growing leaps and bounds. This is great news for us as we’re big proponents of the Rails platform.  All of the energy and community behind Rails offers a lot of credence to the platform, and this was very evident with all of the many interesting sessions at RailsConf.

It was also clear that the number of Rails jobs is growing faster than the number of available engineers. In the foyer of the conference was a big message board and there was easily a ratio of 25:1 the number of “we’re hiring” to “looking for work” posts.   We are  looking to hire developers too, and we will teach you Rails and Ruby if you’re a great programmer in another language.

But onto the cool stuff! Adobe Apollo, and to a lesser degree Flex, was a common topic. Its very clear that the Adobe Flex/Flash platform is going to be a major player. Some engineers from Adobe did a session and showed how easy it is to connect an Apollo app to a Rails backend. Super cool!

We went to so many sessions that they are all blurring together. Here is a link to all of the RailsConf 2007 presentations.