One bright Monday morning in September, 3 wizards set out for Berlin. Their quest: to attend RailsConf Europe 2007.

A smooth journey was followed by disaster at the hotel - one of our rooms was not ready yet. Fortunately, it turned out we were on the executive floor and so got to enjoy beers, newspapers and nibbles in Hotel Melia’s Executive Lounge.

How many techies does it take to find a conference?
Having checked out the room (bounced on the bed, put the towels and slippers in suitcases, eaten all complementary biscuits and/or gummy sheep), we then went to check out the town. As none of us had the sense to bring any info on the conference’s whereabouts, we made sure to find the hotel that housed it. This turned out to be easy - just follow the stream of t-shirts with computer “jokes” on them. “Run Dos Run” never gets old.

Day 2 in the big Berlin hotel…
…and we nearly missed the conference. I showed off my travel experience by setting my alarm but forgetting to set the clock an hour forward. Fortunately, we were saved by Fred’s ninja-like breakfast sense - there was no way he was going to miss breakfast in the Executive Lounge before the conference.

(Original photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson)

Hang on a minute, why are we here again?
And so we finally made it RailsConf Europe 2007. There followed 2 days of varied talks, demonstrations, general hobnobbing and excellent food, including sightings of celebrities such as his DHHness and Martin Fowler, a trip to RejectConf in a bar called the Pirates Cove (which means what with also visiting the Ambulance Bar, I can only assume all bars in Berlin have black walls and look like they used to be boiler rooms) and my personal highlight, Evan Phoenix’s wonderful graphs to demonstrate that Rubinius, while slower than the space shuttle, was faster than a tortoise and even a 3-legged dog.

Homeward Bound
Mostly due to Steve’s shoe exploding only after we’d got through security, the journey back was relatively unexciting and, of course, we found that it was raining in Stansted.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 by Henry Addison and is filed under Community, Wizardry. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.