Earlier this year, I built a little web application in Ruby to help out with RailsConf 2012 - basically a gateway between Twitter and SMS using Twilio. Twilio thought it was a pretty cool hack, and they wanted to make sure that the code didn’t just get lost in austinonrails’ GitHub account, so they asked if I could write up how I did it for their blog - read it over at Building an Unconference App For RailsConf with Twilio and Twitter

Here’s an excerpt:

How do you keep everyone at a mega-conference up to date about what’s going on in a community-organized unconference that’s running side-by-side? That’s the problem Austin on Rails set out to solve when RailsConf 2012 came to our city.

What’s an unconference? It’s a participant-led conference – instead of having speakers apply to speak months ahead of time, and having committees set the schedule in advance, unconferences are more fluid. This is great for a fast-moving technology like Rails, where you may have put something up on GitHub last night, and you can show it off the next day! Of course, the problem with this format is – how do you let people know what’s going on?

Austin on Rails took on the responsibility of organizing the unconference, BohConf. We could have hack sessions, talks, or birds-of-a-feather going on. Based on previous BohConf/RailsConfs, one of the biggest complaints was that people would have gone to a BohConf happening if only they’d known about it!

Read more over at Twilio - Building an Unconference App For RailsConf with Twilio and Twitter