I was traveling for a wedding for half the week so I didn't do a whole lot for the conference but I do have some thoughts I want to put down.

Finances

I really want to get tax advice before I start talking with sponsors about taking their money and speakers about giving them money. I had a conference organizer tell me that they gave speakers a certain amount of money because if they gave any more it would actually cost the speakers more in taxes somehow. I also know that RubyCentral is a non-profit and when companies sponsor RubyConf or RailsConf they can write those off as a donation. Blastoff Rails is not a non-profit and I doubt I could get classified as one before next year so I am wondering how that might change the math for sponsors. Should I be looking into maybe asking Ruby Central to help me handle money? I think that is something they could do.

Speakers

I really want to invite some people from non-technical backgrounds to speak at this conference. Like people that just build stuff or solve problems in ways that may have parallels to programming and could inspire attendees in similar ways. I also would love to invite a "vibe coder" to come tell us about how they got into programming through AI. I think that would be interesting to hear about. We will see if any of these people would be at all interested in coming to a programming conference.

Am I to Early?

I am a little bit nervous that if I start reaching out to speakers now, they won't be able to plan that far ahead and maybe they will say yes but later realize they can't attend and leave me in a lurch. I am not totally sure how to mitigate this right now, besides having some friends who wouldn't mind having a backup talk ready in case this happens.