Dangerous Ideas

Update: The ticket has been traded! Thanks to all who wrote to me!

I have a ticket to RailsConf in Chicago, but I think I’m going to have to give it up. I’d be happy to sell my ticket to someone else for the original price ($400).

Of course, that’d be boring (but totally acceptable), so in the interest of getting to work with more people in the Ruby and Rails community I thought I’d also offer an option for a trade … If you don’t have the dough (or would prefer a warmer fuzzier alternative to paying with cold hard cash) I’d be willing to pay for your ticket (or even for the ticket plus airfare, hotel, and car) in exchange for your time. The requirements for this are:

• You need to be a good programmer. By good programmer, I don’t mean the look-at-me-I-can-do-super-fancy-metaprogramming-while-chewing-gum-backwards type. After all, only about 20 percent of programming requires mad skillz (and I think we have that covered) It’s the other 80 percent I need help with, and that just requires someone with a good foundation in programming, common sense, and the ability to get stuff done without much direction. And programmers who have a great foundation in other languages (e.g. Smalltalk, Python) but who are relatively new to Ruby and Rails are welcome to try to convince me.

• You think you’d enjoy working with me and my company. To get an idea of the sort of person I am, you might want to check out my blog (well, if you’re seeing this, you’re reading it now). Also, some info about my company. It’s called Colorful Expressions (to evoke the feeling some people feel with their computers). We’re a consulting company (we don’t have a fancy money-generating Web application – yet, anyway) that works mostly with small businesses and non-profits. We have an interest in working for social justice organizations and often end up charging a lot less than your typical programming shop would as a result.

• You’d be willing to negotiate a favorable rate of exchange and be willing to work (paid) for time in addition to the trade if necessary. After all, I have no idea who you are and I’m going to be making more or less a snap judgment, and it’s also hard to just stick a nearly random person into a project for a few hours and expect something great to happen.

It might be that no one will want to take me up on a trade – heck, even I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or just silly – and I’ll just end up selling the ticket. But at least I tried to be creative … ;-)

If you are interested in either buying the ticket or working out a trade, please e-mail me at jennyw@dangerousideas.com with “RailsConf” in the subject (this address gets huge amounts of spam), or, if you want to share your reasons with the world, feel free to post a comment here (but either e-mail me separately or include your contact info).

P.S. Chicago a really fun city to visit. For vegetarians, Soul Vegetarian East and The Chicago Diner are two great restaurants not to be missed. Also, since RailsConf overlaps with Chicago’s 2006 Pride Weekend, there are tons of once-a-year events happening. I hope that people going to the conference get a chance to explore the city.