Yesterday I spoke at and attended Ruby Manor. It was a grass route conference with the attendees determining the agenda and the organising duo aiming to keep costs to an absolute minimum. So successful were they infact, and as one twitterer aptly points out, that for an amazing £12 you got a series of excellent talks, no annoying sponsorship and £500 behind the bar at the end of the night. Given even the cheapest of conferences aimed at freelancers clocks in well over the £100 mark, this really was a fantastic achievement.

On a personal note I presented on nanite which is a background processing solution for rails and merb. It was quite a technical talk and I was trying to get a lot into the 30 minutes timeslot, so it felt a little rushed. Nevertheless most people seemed to grab the concept and the live demo at the end went really well. For those that missed the event I'm sure the videos will be online soon, but in the meantime there's an excellent coverage on this blog and the slides from my presentation are available on slideshare or below:

Back in Feburary 2007 myself and Andy went to BarcampLondon2 on an exploratory trip to bash around a few ideas for what would later become idlasso. I presented on scaling web applications, the presentation for which can be seen at slideshare or below:

Just a quick post to say we won £1000 at Barcamp Sheffield in the best new startup competition (see us get our cheque here). Thanks to all at PlusNet for a great weekend.