Yesterday, I had the pleasure of spending 12 hours in a hotel conference room learning all about Ruby and Rails at the Softies on Rails Workshop. I know you’re immediately saying to yourself, “who would send you to a training class on a Saturday?” The answer would be “me”.

I have always been interested in Ruby on Rails and have gone through all of the typical demos, screencasts, etc that you find online. While that was all and good and gave me a (very) basic overview, there’s nothing like actually talking to people who really use it (for “real”!) and have them show you the ropes. The workshop, which was put on by the folks at Softies on Rails, was aimed at Microsoft developers, but at least 25% of the attendees (including Brian who led the Rails portion) were running Mac. Mac and Rails just work well together, what can you say…

Anyways, I walked away from the workshop with a much greater understanding of the technologies and am really anxious to play around with things a bit more and see what I can do with them. Brian and Jeff did a fantastic job presenting and the whole event was well worth the price of admission. If they do this workshop again, I would almost be inclined to attend again just because there is so much more to learn (and it never hurts to see/do things again).

Besides the workshop being such a great event, I got to meet some really cool people who were also attending. As always, I wish Apple could sponsor me as I pretty much sold every person talking to me that they should be running on a Mac. It seems that everyone is somewhat interested in the machines, but once they see things running (including how well Windows runs under Parallels ~ if you gotta use it), they’re sold. It went as far as another Mike, who after sitting next to me the whole day, was going to swing by the store on the way home to pick up his brand new MacBook! I thought that was cool… :)

Anyways, I can’t say enough good things about the Softies on Rails event. Learned lots of really interesting things and met a bunch of very cool people. I highly recommend attending the next time they do this…

I’m really looking forward to this event and getting a hands-on/better feel for all things Ruby on Rails. I’ve loved every minute that I have ever spent playing around with Rails. Hopefully after attending this workshop, I can move my exposure up to the next level…