It’s about 11:15 a.m. and I’m walking up the sidewalk to Red Hat Headquarters when someone coming out of the building sees my Seaside t-shirt and asks, “Hey! Is that Seaside the framework… or Seaside the town?” You know you’re around your own kind when you get a question like that.

Today was the first day of the Ruby Hoedown, the first ever southeastern regional Ruby conference. I arrived a couple of hours early to see if I could be of any help setting up, but Nathaniel pretty much had things under control, so my new friend Mark Barton and I walked to lunch a few blocks away. The walk didn’t take all that long, maybe ten minutes, but in the 100+ degree temperature weather that Raleigh had today it seemed much longer. I’m not normally a big Burger King fan, but when it appeared around the corner it was like an oasis in the desert. Luckily, we managed to find a shortcut on the way back.

Back at the Hoedown, more people had begun to arrive. We have about 125 in attendance, which is pretty cool considering that that’s two or three times as many people as attended the first RubyConf back in 2001. After some introductions, Ezra Zygmuntowicz (zig-mun-tuv-itch) spoke first, about Merb. It’s a web framework built on Mongrel and Erb that’s an alternative to Rails and which effectively replaces the ActionPack component of Rails (i.e. the view and controller). Ezra started Merb as a hack, to get around some performance problems with Rails. The guiding design principle is to keep the Merb core small and simple. Ezra feels that Rails has gotten too large and gets slower with each new release. Merb features non-clever code, such as a simplified routing system that leads to smaller stack traces (as compared to Rails) when something goes wrong. It’s a “hacker’s framework.” The upcoming 0.4 release of the framework should be feature complete, with all additional functionality to be provided via plugins.

Up next was Jay Phillips, speaking about Adhearsion, a Ruby framework for Voice over IP (VoIP) application development on Asterix boxes. This is a topic about which I know zero, but according to Jay, VoIP development sucks. An Asterix application is written as a “dial plan”, a long and difficult-to-read script. There are few if any database-driven VoIP applications, and code sharing is almost non-existent. Jay hopes to change that with Adhearsion, and especially with the Adhearsion.com web site. There’s a Linux distribution called AsterixNow, based on Red Hat, that provides an out-of-the-box solution for setting up Asterix. That distribution should soon include Adhearsion, maybe after the upcoming 0.8 release of Adhearsion. Due to technical difficulties we weren’t able to see a live demo of Adhearsion, but Jay promises to put screencasts up on the Adhearsion.com web site.

The last presentation this afternoon was Bruce Tate, speaking about “The Journey”: where we’ve been, where we are, and where we could go. Because it was such a compelling talk (not to say the first two weren’t compelling talks), I didn’t take a lot of notes. Hopefully, Bruce will post the slides on his web site.

I knew that we were supposed to have a social get-together, with food, at Pullen Park after today’s events. I even copied down the directions when Nathaniel announced it. But somewhere in there I missed the fact that the time had been moved up from 7:00 p.m. (when it was originally scheduled) to 6:00 p.m. So by the time I arrived at the park, everyone had finished eating and the caterers were packing up. Which is a shame, because if you know me, you know how much I love eating outdoors, what with the ants and flies. Luckily, I managed to snag a couple of pieces of fried chicken and a roll, and went to a nearby table to join the group there.

As I sat down, Marcel Molina was in the middle of what he called his “medium length” description of Werewolf (a.k.a. Mafia), a game which I’ve heard references to but haven’t actually had the opportunity to play. There was some talk of getting up a game tonight, but that plan sort-of fizzled due to lack of a suitable venue. Hopefully, we’ll be able to work something out for tomorrow. When I went to leave the park, and head back to the hotel, the song “Werewolves of London” was playing on the car radio. Coincidence? You be the judge.