what_i_am.upto(2010)

So, after my return from Cairo and right before heading to Las Vegas for RailsConf tomorrow morning, I have put together a little website called The Ruby Toolbox.

The page is meant to give you information on what Ruby tool from GitHub you could use to do X, Y or Z. The tools are assorted in categories like “Testing Frameworks”, “State Machines”, “Markup Processors” and so on. The projects listed in each category have scores calculated from their respective GitHub repositories’ watcher and fork counts, so you can get an idea which project is the most popular in the dev community.

I hope this will be of use to people i.e. wondering which test framework they should choose from the plethora of options or to find out about alternatives to currently used tools and their popularity.

So, head over to ruby-toolbox.com and drop me a line whether you like it, tweet me @thedeadserious or tell me right at RailsConf in Vegas!

If you want a (your?) project or another category added, please also drop me a line because the categories and projects on the page only serve as a starting point. This will hopefully grow in time!

As David A. Black states on his blog, there won’t be a RailsConf Europe this year:

Ruby Central and O’Reilly have decided to take a hiatus from producing RailsConf Europe this year, for the simple reason that it didn’t bring in enough revenue last year to justify doing it again, particularly given the tight economy and the need to err on the side of caution. RailsConf Europe has always been a really great event, and people who go to it really love it, but we need a year of retrenchment while we figure out how to get everyone else to realize how great it is! Plans for 2010 are not certain yet; we’re taking it one year at a time.

Quite disappointing, even though I was not in Berlin last year (but oddly enough in Portland, which makes for a travel distance of several thousand kilometers against 300). Maybe they should not have the conference hosted in super-exclusive downtown-hotels (like it was at the Maritim in Berlin), but rather just in some convention center.

In other news, David Heinemeier Hansson has announced the opening of registration for RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas. The event is taking place from May 4th through 7th, in the Las Vegas Hilton. I really hope this does not mean RailsConf US won’t be happening in 2010 for not “bringing enough revenue”, as I can imagine the Las Vegas Hilton being more expensive to rent than the Oregon Convention Center in the last years.

They have early registration open until March 16th, so go and grab a seat and save 200 bucks!

You might also want to check out this years CabooseConf, the Ruby/Rails hacker event which will also be taking place at the Las Vegas Hilton during RailsConf, and can be entered for free with an exhibit hall only pass. You might be asked for a link to an open source submission you did, though.