Once upon a time, in an IRC room not so far away, a few people from the Pittsburgh Ruby Users Group were talking about the awesome time we had just had at Ruby Conf 2011. We were really excited and had lots of neat ideas, including this one:

 carols10cents: we should have a conference in pittsburgh! 

There was much agreement, and thus the brainstorming began! We have a google doc with all sorts of ideas. Some of those are being used this year, some were a bit too ambitious for our first year ;) We also called it “Project Octoconf” for a while so that we didn’t get stuck on picking a name– not because we have any affiliation with Github/octocat, but because we see Pittsburgh Ruby, and Pittsburgh in general, reaching into lots of different things and slowly taking over the world, quietly and for good, of course :D

Since there are so many Ruby conferences though, what would make someone want to come to ours? Well, what about all those Ruby conferences? Where do you start? What if you’re not sure about this whole conference scene? What all goes on there? Won’t it be all people who have been going to conferences forever?

So we decided to try to be the best Ruby conference for someone’s first Ruby conference. We feel strongly that interacting with the community at conferences is one of the great things about programming in Ruby, and we’d like to help people get into that.

To that end, we’re trying to keep costs down (and Pittsburgh helps with that as it’s a relatively cheap city), do outreach to people who haven’t been to conferences before, and plan activities with a new conference goer in mind.

We are so grateful and excited for all the progress we’ve made and all the people who have helped us so far, and we hope you’ll join us for the culmination of these efforts in August!