Last week, I packed my bags and headed for Norfolk, VA to speak at the Mid-Atlantic Developers Expo. I've spent the better part of the past year traveling the country, speaking about Geospatial Programming using Ruby and Rails. As a long-time lover of maps, the topic has been a joy to introduce to the community of Ruby developers, at both small regional conferences like MagicRuby or MountainRuby, and at major national conferences like RubyConf 2010 and RailsConf 2011.

This year at OSCON I had the pleasure of giving a talk entitled Upgrading to Rails 3. The talk served as a high level overview of the new features of Rails 3 that are both a boon for developers and something to watch out for when trying to upgrade your Rails 2.3 applications. I followed it up with a live-coding session in which I took a to-do application (built mostly by Intridea’s own Jeremy McAnally) from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3 in the space of just over 10 minutes.