Almost a month ago we made two exciting announcements – the first was that will be hosting an Intro to Ruby1 course on December 10-11, 2010. The second announcement was that we would be giving away one free ticket to a local college/university student and another free ticket away to the co/founder of a local startup company.
Well, we upped the ante and have decided to give away a total of FOUR free tickets. We received a total of 40 submissions and were really encouraged by all of the enthusiastic responses. Without further ado:
After an exhilarating week of hosting the Rails community in Baltimore for , I thought it’d be helpful to share the lessons that we learned organizing .
Community Code Drives Rock!
We had a strong showing of open source authors including , , , , and various members of . Wayne () and Greg () in particular raved about the contributions they were able to make to their projects. Hey, I even got a new release of out thanks to a patch from . Other well known OSS authors that dropped by included , , and . If you were there and we missed you, please drop us a line in the comments!
As many of you know, is a group of individual angel investors that have come together as a loose federation whose primary purpose is to spur continued and sustained economic and technological development in this region. (Obviously, they’d like to make a little coin too.) Last month, Baltimore Angels made a public call for business ideas and received 51 submissions in only a few weeks. How encouraging for Baltimore!
Yair and I submitted , a web application we built that is currently being used by Johns Hopkins to facilitate the administration of more than 300 student organizations at Hopkins. Among other group management features, it provides a budget management component that takes a lot of the paperwork out of allocating and utilizing a group’s budget. Most importantly, it serves as the official mechanism by which Hopkins recognizes their student groups.
I don’t intend to go into much detail about our specific idea. Rather, my intentions are to (a) document our experience for the benefit of interested entrepreneurs, and (b) provide an honest critique of the process. Read the rest of this entry »
