New Sponsor

This week I got my first sponsor agreement signed and money deposited. Now that it is official I feel ok saying that the company is Typesense. They have sponsored other Ruby and Rails conferences and Jason agreed with zero hesitation when I reached out.

Video Recordings within reach

This brings the number of sponsor companies to three, although I still have to get the contract signed and money deposited with the other two. If the other two sponsors come through at the numbers that we talked about I think I can confidently say we will have enough money to pay for video recordings of all the talks using Confreaks. That is the final big expense that I was holding off on committing to. I am slightly surprised but incredibly grateful to the people at the sponsor companies that are taking a chance on me and this conference. The Ruby and Rails community is seriously supportive and I am so thankful to be able to do this.

Tinkering with the Website

I am excited to see how I can try to bring as much value to the sponsors as they are bringing to the conference. With Typesense, I am thinking of making a page on the website where visitors can search for things to do in Albuquerque using the Natural Language Search feature. This will be fun for me to learn a new tool and tinker with the conference site. While avoiding other more important tasks I recently replaced the MailerLite-provided email signup form on the site with my own that hits an api backend hosted in Cloudflare. The MailerLite form was very heavy and clunky and I wanted the site to be as fast and light as possible so I ripped it out. I truly enjoy tinkering so definitely looking forward to more.

Next

My next big focus is CFP. I want to open it up in mid September (and leave it open through January) and I am hoping to use the open source software that Evil Martians created for the SF Ruby conference.