Hawaii is much more than Waikiki. To get the full experience, we recommend that you rent a car before or after the conference and explore the island. A real jewel of Oahu is Lanikai and Kailua, two small towns on the Windward side of the island.
Drive over the Pali Highway (after stopping at the Pali Lookout) and you’ll enter Kailua. Lanikai rests itself to the south-east, and features one of the most beautiful beaches in the entire world.
Stop by Kailua Sailboards and Kayaks and rent a sea kayak. They have everything you’ll need, including a dry bag to store your lunch and valuables. They’ll show you a map and give you tips. You can walk the kayak to the beach from their shop if you’d like to launch from Kailua Beach. If you want a much shorter trip, they will help you strap it to your car so you can launch from Lanikai Beach.
Once in the water, glide over coral reefs as you watch the sea turtles (honu) bob up and down. You’ll want to head for the Mokes, the two islands out in front of Lanikai Beach (featured in the panorama above). You can land your kayak on the island to the left (but not to the right!) and explore the hidden tide pools.
We hope you’ll explore Oahu, as each part of the island is unique and exciting!
Let us know if you have any questions, we want to help ensure you have a great conference and trip to Hawaii.
(this is a personal recommendation, no financial arrangement exists between Aloha on Rails and the vendors mentioned in this post)
Waikiki is beautiful in the morning. The light breeze, sea air, and relaxed vibe fill you with energy. Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails Conference, is excited to offer morning runs both Monday and Tuesday. These runs will be led by fellow Rails developer, surfer, and triathlete Thomas Olausson. Designed to wake you up and show you some of the beautiful scenery of the south shore.
Join Thomas and your fellow developers at 7am at the Starbucks on the corner of Kalakaua and Kapahulu, next door to the conference venue (Marriott Waikiki). The route itself is 3.73 miles and takes you along the makai (ocean) side of Kapiolani park, then around Diamond Head. You’ll be running along the crater’s slope as you look out to the surfers and wind surfers. You’ll turn around at the lookout and eventually run along the mauka (inland) side of Kapiolani Park, arriving back at the Starbucks.
This is considered an easy route, so we welcome anyone that has some running shoes and wants to explore the scenery. We’ve prepared a map of the Aloha on Rails Morning Run.
No sign up required, just meet at the Starbucks on Kalakaua and Kapahulu (easy to find, right on the corner, or ask your hotel) at 7am and be prepared for a beautiful and inspiring way to start your day! For questions, please contact Thomas.
Aloha on Rails is proud to partner with Hawaii Information Consortium, the company that runs eHawaii.gov, to offer a grant for a Hawaii high school student interested in web programming. This grant will cover the registration costs for Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails Conference. The grant is designed to promote web development to young programmers and to connect the next generation of developers with today’s leaders in the field of software development.
The grant is open to any Hawaii high school student interested in programming, is planning to attend college, and is interested in majoring in computer science. The application deadline is midnight (Hawaii Standard Time) September 25th, 2009, so don’t delay! Learn more about the Hawaii High School Student Grant for Aloha on Rails, and fill out an application today! If you are interested in learning more about web development, or want to sharpen your skills, we encourage you to apply.
Aloha on Rails is a one day Rails tutorial and a two day conference held in Waikiki, Oahu on Oct 4-6, 2009. The tutorial is designed to teach those new to web programming how to build, test, and deploy web applications. By the end of the tutorial, students will have a working application hosted on the web! The conference itself is filled with two days of cutting edge, thought provoking, and educational topics for web developers, designers, and business owners.
Aloha on Rails is proud to invest in the next generation of web developers and computer programmers. It is our hope that by helping a young student attend this tutorial and conference, they are set on a path of education that returns them to Hawaii and its strong and growing technology community.
Mahalo to Hawaii Information Consortium for making this grant possible. Learn about all of HIC’s online services for Hawaii constituents at http://www.ehawaii.gov/.
Scott Chacon, from Github and author of the new book Pro Git, gave a sneak peak of his upcoming talk for Aloha on Rails. Titled “The Birth of Git”, Scott will tell the story of how Git and Mercurial were born, and how these two modern distributed revision control systems have evolved. By teaching the historical context and motivations, and philosophical and implementation differences, of these systems, Scott hopes attendees will gain a deeper appreciation for these critically important tools.
Register Today to talk story with Scott and the rest of the incredible lineup of speakers and sessions at Aloha on Rails, the premier destination event for Ruby on Rails.
What are you striving for when you write code? Correctness? Passing tests? A chance to apply that KillerWickedAwesomeInvertedArrayBubbleDistributedRingSort? Beauty?
Strive for maintainability, according to Tammer Saleh, formally of Thoughtbot, author of Shoulda, and now an independent consultant in the San Francisco area. Tammer, along with Chad Pytel (founder of Thoughtbot), will be presenting “You’re Doing It Wrong“, at Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails Conference.
“You’re Doing It Wrong” features all new material from their upcoming book, “Rails AntiPatterns - Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring”, published by Addison-Wesley. Tammer and Chad will take real life code, code they have seen in the wild, and will fix it live on stage. You can even submit code to be healed and rehabilitated.
In this interview, Tammer talks about the root cause for some of these anti-patterns and how to avoid them. Plus, learn why you should attend conferences, and what Tammer is looking forward to in Hawaii.
Register Today to meet Taleh, Chad, and the rest of our incredible speaker and session lineup!
This is not the design talk to be afraid of. This is Design with a capital D. Michael Nieling, founder and principal at Ocupop, will be teaching attendees why Design is the single most important aspect of the development process, and how to address these critical concerns with intelligence and an engineer’s unique abilities. Michael, an engineer turned Designer, has experience designing everything from retail kiosks to interactive web applications to iPhone applications.
Certainly, programming code, architectures, and APIs are important, but they exist only to deliver what is really essential: a truly satisfying and complete user experience. A holistic and pervasively applied Design is the key element to accomplish this goal. Michael will tell stories to illustrate this point, and will help attendees approach and apply Design across the entire product life cycle.
p.s. Michael told me after reading this post to add that he wants to make clear that he doesn’t give a shit about getting a single new client as a result from this talk, he just wants to make sure he doesn’t ever have to use another poorly designed product again. Ever.
I was so excited to visit Alan Gates at Yahoo. I’ve never been to the Yahoo campus before, and I wasn’t disappointed. Alan is a very friendly host, and Yahoo’s cafeteria had lots of gourmet (and cheap) options. Also, I think I saw Jerry Yang hanging out.
While I was there, I sat down with Alan to learn more about his talks at Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails Conference. Alan will be presenting two talks. The first talk, Thinking in Map Reduce, introduces the Map Reduce paradigm and covers what types of programs it is good for and how you can start writing Map Reduce programs. The second talk, Intro to Pig, introduces Pig, the high level language for data processing on Hadoop. Pig makes it very easy to write Map Reduce programs, and lets users get up and running very quickly. Pig is essentially a Domain Specific Language for Map Reduce programs. Alan is the architect for the Pig project, so this is a rare chance to learn about this cutting edge technology from the source.
Register Today to learn about Map Reduce and meet Alan and the rest of our amazing lineup. Seats are selling out, so act fast! Register before September 1st for our Early Bird rate.
While I was in San Francisco, I was lucky to sit down with Blake Mizerany, author of Sinatra and engineer at Heroku. Blake will be presenting “Forget Kindergarten, Learn to Scale” at Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails Conference. During the interview, Blake gives us a sneak peak into his talk, which covers lessons learned from building Heroku. Blake will also teach why these techniques work, ensuring attendees have a deep understanding of scaling theory and practice.
On a recent trip to San Francisco, I had the pleasure of being invited to the Engine Yard offices. I was able to interview Ezra Zygmuntowicz (and others, stay tuned!), a founder and engineer of Engine Yard and a presenter at Aloha on Rails. His talk is titled “Where Do I Put This Data?”. It’s a timely and critical look at the recent explosion of non-RDBMS data storage solutions. Ezra “throws some cold water” on the dogmatic #nosql crowd, and helps us put it all into perspective. Ezra has helped deploy key-value stores such as Redis into Engine Yard’s infrastructure, so he’s sure to have some juicy stories to tell.
Meet Ezra and all of our speakers at Aloha on Rails, the premier destination event for Ruby on Rails. Register Today before the event sells out!
