So far the highlight has been Chad Fowler’s address. Particularly, what does it mean to be a Ruby/Rails developer in a bad economy?
- Market yourself. Be remarkable. From the book Purple Cow - “remarkable means something that is remarked on”
- You have a moral imperative to market yourself. If you are 5 times better at programming and you’re doing tech support because you don’t market yourself, you’re robbing from your company.
- Java’s competitive advantage is the number of developers. In a bad economy, this takes away Java’s main competitive advantage, because the number of available programmers goes up. In a sense, this means it’s a great time to promote the benefits of Rails to your organization. There are more developers available, and Rails is more efficient at accomplishing the same task.
- Used the example of Charlie Parker, the jazz musician. He was both critical and criticized, which means
- doing something sufficiently interesting that people were talking about him, and
- doing something interesting and important enough that he scared people
I’ll add other notes as I have time later today.