Kyle Cordes

I’m back from AYE. The last session I attended was Dwayne Phillips’s on “Distraction”. Distraction is a recurring enemy here, always ready to strike, to divert me from the task at hand. I’ve recently been using “disconnection” to fight distraction and focus on an intense task for a few hours, and noticed the same notion […]

I’m heading to the AYE conference shortly, as I did last year. My strategy then was to attend many Weinberg sessions, which has turned out to be wise in retrospect, as Jerry won’t be there this year, he is home recovering from illness. I am eager to see how the rest of the AYE team […]

I just attended Dave Thomas’s keynote at RailsConf. He had many interesting things to say, most notably that 60%+ of his Java-centric conference-circuit friends, mostly people who have written books on Java, speak regularly on Java, and have lots of experience as Java “architects”, are now making a living with Ruby / Rails.

Dave talked […]

I’m at RailsConf. In a flagrant attempt to be one of the cool kids, I’ve set up a Flickr account to share my RailsConf Photos.
Of the few dozen conference I’ve attented, this one has the highest incidence so far of people sitting around, in large groups, working alone on their notebook computers; some of […]

I’m going to RailsConf 2006 in Chicago next month:
The interesting thing about this is that I signed up before I knew how popular it would be - it sold out in a few days, so the pent-up demand must have been remarkable. More remarkable is that it sold out long before the full […]

Here is an idea I picked up at AYE and again at ETech; I mentioned it at the Ruby UG last month, and am writing it up here to encourage its use.
A common problem at growing and changing groups of people (such as user group members, conference attendees who see each other rarely, etc.), is […]