Week 8 Review

Venue

Ok, I think I finally made some concrete progress on this. By some miracle, after several weeks of silence, the cheaper of the two venues I was looking at finally got back to me and scheduled a time to do a walk through and get any questions answered. After looking at the facilities, confirming the dates are available, and confirming our event was something they could handle, it looks like we are a go! They said they would hold the dates for me and get a final contract drawn up by Friday. Spoiler alert, they didn’t get me the contract by Friday. But I feel a whole lot better about the whole thing after meeting the guy that handles the venue in person and I am reasonably confident we will get it wrapped up next week.

Informational Interviews

I had to reschedule my informational interview that I had this week and another person got back to me so now I have two interviews coming up. I am really excited about both of them, though, because I have heard a ton of good things about the conferences they organize. Also something unique about them is that they are still actively organizing the conferences. Only one of the people I have spoken to so far is still an active conference organizer.

Unexpected Inspiration

One of the reasons I wanted to put on a conference was because of the energy and inspiration I get from attending them. I wanted to recreate that in my own city, in my own way – for those near me and, selfishly, for myself. But the conference hasn’t even happened yet and just from being more involved in the online Ruby and RoR community I am getting an extra boost. I originally got on social media this month to do marketing and look for potential speakers but I ended up getting excited by people’s projects and spending more time outside of work coding (when I really should have been working on the conference actually, lol).

RailsConf

Because I was coding more this last week, I feel like I have a ton to get done before RailsConf. Now that I have dates semi-locked in with a venue I need to get a simple website up and a Sponsor prospectus done. That way I have something to show people that I talk with.