A geeky but fun week-end

I am co-organizer of SDForum's 3rd Silicon Valley Ruby conference. It will easily be the best conference for all things Ruby and Rails in the valley this year and likely the best such gathering outside of Portland (RailConf 2008) and Salt Lake City (RubyConf 2008).


The line-up of speakers includes emerging applications of Ruby and Rails by startups, esoteric applications by academia, as well as mature enterprisey companies seeing the "light" and supporting the community. As quick a sample, we will have technical presentations by:

• Microsoft, Sun, and IBM


• Rails cloud computing deployment providers: Joyent and Heroku


• Startups like Twitter and Top 10% Facebook application "Friends for Sale" of We.AreSerio.us


• Lighting talks and demos + lots more

Like last year, the conference happens in the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation starting Friday April 18th and continuing Saturday April 19th.


Come learn what folks are doing with Rails and Ruby. However, let me forewarn you that If you are still deciding what platform to use to create your new Facebook or OpenSocial application _OR_ your new Web 2.0 startup _OR_ your next enterprisey project, attending this conference could result in a no-brainer decision...

Hope to see you there!

Welcome to_the :max

I decided to rename the blog to_the :max.

This is a simple and more interesting name.

I'll admit that it could be read as being a bit pretentious at first, though maybe just a tad more than the previous name max's blog. Nonetheless, blogs are about opinions and I plan to be unapologetic here. The new name, I believe, reflects both my personality and my namesake.

I also added a list of blogs (on right, page down a bit) that I frequently read from various colleagues (some I know personally and some I do not) in the fields of my interest. It goes without saying that the majority are on tech or tech-related topics...

This is a list I have gathered and pruned over the past six months. If tech is of interest then I would recommend you to check them out. I'll keep the list up to date slowly as I add and/or remove links.

For the astute reader, you will recognize that to_the :max is valid Ruby syntax for a method call passing the symbol :max :-) This is inspired from Josh Susser's has_many :though blog.