Over the past view days I once again went undercover at a Ruby conference, Ruby Hoedown in Nahsville, Tennessee. I say undercover because I’m not a rubyist by trade, but only as a hobbyist.

The ruby conferences I have been to are in stark contrast to those in the .Net world. The tersest comparison I can come up with is Passion vs Stuff. I don’t want to make it sound like Ruby people are passionate and .Net people are all materialistic, because that isn’t the case; however the conference content usually aligns to the comparison.

Don’t believe me? Here is my impressions of my last .Net Conference.

Here’s stuff that just come out. Here is stuff you can use in Visual Studio. Here’s some cool stuff. Here’s blinking stuff. Here’s new stuff. Here’s old stuff. Here’s stuff in a bag. Here is stuff that is coming out…eventually. Here’s demos and demos of stuff….stuff stuff stuff.

So what does a Ruby conference sound like in comparison?

Here’s this problem I solved. Here’s this pattern I found. Here is this social phenomena I found. Here’s why you should care about X. Here is this movement that’s really cool.

The list is shorter on purpose because there have been fewer speakers, and fewer attendees at the Ruby conferences than at the .Net ones, but every topic is usually amazing. People talk about ideas they really care about, instead of the tools they bought to fix the problem. If a tool does come up, it’s usually by the tool creator and brought up in the context of having a problem, but no tool existed to solve it.

To illustrate the differences in the conference style even more, I cannot imagine having an open signup to give lightning talks at a .Net conference. What would people say? Would anyone even sign up? What are they passionate about? I don’t know, but they should be passionate about something or have 10 minutes of something interesting to talk about.

I don’t want to write a review of Ruby Hoedown when the conference is only half over, but the keynoter of the first day, Ben Scofield, gave a great talk about achieving excellence. Basically you’re either on the pathway to excellence or you’ve decided to remain adequate. It sounds bad, but trust me it isn’t. It perfectly aligns to my comparison of the conference cultures. You’re either here because you want to be promoted or you’re here because you’re still on that path. Both reasons are valid and I’m sure both reasons are represented at either conference.

So here’s my call to action, and it’s easy. Go to a Ruby conference. You don’t have to start coding Ruby and I promise you that you will find the talks, maybe not all of them, relate to your daily work. You’ll learn a lot about Ruby. You’ll learn that a ton of people actually write tests. You’ll meet people from all walks of life. You’ll see that slides don’t have to have bullet points and screenshots. Most importantly, you will see speeches from people we are really passionate about their craft.