About RailsConf Europe

RailsConf Europe, co-produced by Ruby Central, Inc. and O'Reilly Media Inc., is the official, trusted event for the Rails Community in Europe.

A full-stack Ruby framework for building database-driven websites, Rails is increasingly becoming one of the most popular platforms of its kind. Rails is about productivity and programmer comfort. Rails is "opinionated," favoring "convention over configuration." Following its path is easy and yields results quickly, with minimal configuration and project start-up overhead. Because Rails projects come together quickly and are results-driven, Rails is gaining traction in the business community and is perceived as having business value.

Rails is written in Ruby, an object-oriented scripting language with roots in Perl, Lisp, and Smalltalk, but particularly popular in the Agile development community and among programmers who value elegance, flexibility, and readability. Rails developers leverage the strengths of the Ruby language at every phase of application development, from database initialization to HTML templating.

To meet the increasing demand for skill building, and to spread the joy of Rails to programmers and IT managers alike, Ruby Central and O'Reilly Media are teaming up to produce RailsConf Europe 2007. The event will feature the most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies from across the continent and around the world, providing attendees with examples of development paradigms and design strategies to enable businesses and new arrivals to the Web to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.

Experience RailsConf Europe 2007

• An entire conference (three full days) dedicated to Ruby on Rails
• A spotlight on creative experts, leaders, and the under-the-radar innovations driving Rails adoption and integration
• See how European Rails users are making money at Rails
• Find out the state of Ruby on Rails in Europe and see how others are applying the Rails framework in their projects and businesses
• Meet up, connect and collaborate with the growing european Rails community
• New for 2007 is a full day of Rails tutorials - hands on, in-depth, half day sessions
• Meet members of the Rails core development team
• Face to face interaction, networking and inspiration with other like-minded programmers
• A meeting place where larger and/or more estabilished Rails users come together with unsung innovators and brand new start-ups to inspire one another and generate fresh ideas.

Who Should Attend

• Ruby on Rails enthusiasts
• Web developers and programmers (independent, startup, enterprise/corporate)
• Other open source developers and hackers seeking to expand their skillset
• IT managers tracking emerging technologies
• Tech-savvy entrepreneurs with business ideas looking to implement web-based start-ups quickly in order to assess idea's potential for success
• Users at every level: new, power, intermediate, advanced, expert
• Others interested in web technologies and strategic implementation

Program Chair

David A. Black
David A. Black is a long-time Ruby and Rails programmer, author, and trainer. Active in the Ruby world since 2000, David is the author of Ruby for Rails: Ruby techniques for Rails developers, from Manning Publications. He has co-organized numerous Ruby/Rails conferences and spoken at conferences and Ruby/Rails users groups in the United States, Canada, and England. David is the chief author of Ruby's standard scanf library, and the author and maintainer of the official Ruby Change Request site.

Associate Program Chairs

Chad Fowler
Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the world's largest corporations. He recently lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center. He is co-founder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby Conference and The International Rails Conference, and is a leading contributor in the Ruby community. Chad is a contributor and editor for numerous books and is author of My Job Went to India (and all I got was this lousy book): 52 Ways to Save Your Job and Rails Recipes.

Rich Kilmer
Richard Kilmer is the founder of Virginia-based software and services company InfoEther, Inc.. His background includes peer-to-peer software, wireless web, workflow, and pen computing. His current projects make production use of Ruby on several DARPA research projects. He is an active member of the Ruby development community working on Alph, FreeRIDE, RubyGems, RubyJDWP, Jabber4R, and hosts RubyForge.org.