I haven’t written anything about this year’s Euruko (European Ruby Conference) yet, have I? I enjoyed it. It was nice to visit somewhere apart from Munich this time. Much as I like Munich, after three years in a row there, it was good to have a change.

I’d never been to Vienna before, so it was an opportunity to do so. I know that I’ve barely scratched the surface of that great city, though, and I know I’ll be back.

Before my trip to Vienna, I hadn’t been on holiday for ages—not since my trip to County Galway back in May/June, in fact—and I really was exhausted. Having to wake up at stupid o’clock to get to Luton for my flight didn’t help, either. In spite of this, I managed a late night visit to Metalab on Friday—when, alas, nothing much was going on—but had to skive off early from the restaurant on Saturday night in order to catch some quality pillow-time. I’d planned to go back to Metalab on Sunday night with some of the others who weren’t rushing off to the airport or otherwise straight back home, but I ended up falling asleep after an early supper, and decided to take my body’s hint and go to bed.

The conference itself went well, and was even better subscribed than previous years, while the T-shirts were an order of magnitude better. It was quite a novelty to have internet access this time! The University of Vienna supplied both the venue—a lecture theatre in a gorgeous building—and the wireless network.

One fringe benefit that eluded me until late on the second day was that the expensive, access-fee-required paper I’d mentioned in my talk was entirely free from within the university network courtesy of the University of Vienna’s academic subscription to the ACM. (Incidentally, does anyone else find it ironic that they use ColdFusion for their site?)

As soon as I realised, I spent the next half hour scouring the archives for interesting papers I could grab.

As for what actually went on at Euruko, Leah kept a much more assiduous set of notes about the individual talks, so I’ll defer to them.