I went to the San Francisco Ruby conference this past week and it was a super fun and productive experience. I got to meet so many cool people and I got a lot to think about just experiencing another conference. And of course I got a lot of inspiration and energy from the talks and people. It's definitely on a different level than the conference I want to organize. But the energy is something I think I can and want to emulate. The startups and the companies there demoing their products using Ruby and people like Carmine Paulino talking about his Ruby LLM gem and everything that it's being used for is something that want at BlastOff Rails.

One thing that I have been thinking about is the space that my conference is in and how to use it best. Rocky Mountain Ruby had a big room for talks and a smaller break room (that also had the talks playing on a tv, which was a nice touch). SF Ruby was much larger of course but almost all of it took place in one large space with curtains sort of dividing it up. This was different from any of the other conferences I have been to but it was kind of nice to be able to flow between spaces more easily (no doors and stairs between things). My space is just one large room for everything and then if people need a break they will be in the museum lobby or outside. It is going to be interesting. I think I need to go spend some time at the museum to get a better sense of how it will feel.

Now I need to focus on promoting the CFP. I am hoping to make some AI videos to make things a bit more fun and interesting. I don't want to pay a huge amount of money though so we will see what I can come up with. I looked at some services and they seemed to be hundreds of dollars if you wanted to generate more than a handful of videos as a trial. I need to come up with some other ways to promote it as well. Probably posting in a bunch of slack channels and forums. I think it is too late to try to get on another podcast that will come out in time for people to listen and come up with a submission. Admittedly I should have thought about this sooner. There are still several weeks before the deadline though and I assume there will be a good amount of last minute submissions.