Snakes and Rubies tomorrow
Less than twenty-four hours to go until Snakes and Rubies in Chicago!
Adrian Holovaty, one of the creators of the Django framework for Python, and David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails framework will answer questions about their work and the future of Web application development.
The event planners have been accepting questions for the speakers via the web. All of the submitted questions are available for viewing on the website, complete with the obligatory Web2.0 compliant RSS feeds for everything.
There are some really interesting and thought provoking questions sprinkled throughout the ones submitted that hopefully will lead to a good comparison of Django vs. Rails. Personally, I think collecting questions like this is a really cool idea for a small conference with a limited number of presenters. I bet it works out really well.
I am, however, a little curious about one thing…
As of right now, there are 135 people RSVP’d to attend. Unfortunately, the Snakes and Rubies event site says that there is seating available for only 100 people. That seems odd to me considering it is being held at DePaul University. I would think they could easily find a facility that could hold more people.
For example, when my local Linux user group hosted the CPLUG Security Conference earlier this year, we had about 200+ people register to attend. We were able to reserve one of the larger lecture halls at Messiah College (a rather small school) with room to comfortably hold 175 people and then ability to cram some more in with extra chairs if necessary. If I recall, about 150+ people actually attended (75%) and everything worked out very well.
If we could pull that off at a small school in Southcentral PA, you’d think they could do the same in Chicago. My only thought is that the planners are expecting at least 25% of the people not to show up, which is not a bad assumption. I would just be concerned that with such a targeted topic/event and an explicit RSVP system, their turnout might be closer to 100%. I guess people could always just stand or sit on the floor. :)
Yet another Python event (along with PyCon2006) that I think would be extremely cool to attend. Hopefully there will be some audio of the event available at some point, or at least partial transcripts and/or presentation slides. It’d be really awesome if they did some video recording and made it available (Google Video anyone?).
Best of luck to both Adrian and David, and I hope the event goes well.