Rails Camp has come and gone and, though [I showcased a bunch of the projects on flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/toolmantim/tags/railscamp07projects/), I still hadn’t got around to writing a full rundown.

Rails Camp 2007 was a resounding success. Hearing Martin Stannard ask “Can we stay here forever?” and overhearing conversations since the camp to the tone of “How f*cking cool was Rails Camp. We need more weekends like that!” has made it pretty clear that it wasn’t only I who loved it.

The idea for Rails Camp started as a drunken suggestion by Jason Crane and Ben Askins that we should combine camping (the tent variety) with some Rails geekery, putting a bunch of passionate people in the same space, without internet and necessities for 4 days and see what happens. Much to everybody’s luck Ben followed through by actually finding a venue, figuring out costings, setting up an eventwax account and wiki and coordinating the whole event. Ben, you rule!

After driving 1.5 hours outside of Sydney on Friday afternoon we arrived at Camp Chapman: a girl scout hall with the meanest of fireplaces, no internet and very questionable power lines.

On the first night, Jason had organised a big pizza cook-off where everybody was assigned groups, came up with their own pizza, and gave it a Rails-related name (of course)… acts_as_pizza, acts_as_slicable and Gem of a Pizza where some of the best. After that we had a build-your-own-webapp where a person from each group did a tag-grab and then had 20 minutes to come up with a crazy web app on butchers paper and present it to the group. Everyone had 3 diggs to use to vote for their favourite concepts and the winners got to walk away with a wicked [Peepcode voucher](http://peepcode.com) thanks to Geoffrey Grosenbach.

Guitar Hero, some geekery and talking around the fire finished off the rest of the night, then we hit our bunks (except for the insane Dylan Egan and Ben who decided that camping in the pouring rain was a better idea).

Saturday started with a bit of breaky and then straight into the sessions, with Keith Pitty putting a hand up to break the ice with a talk on using ActionMailer, then I gave a talk on Camping whilst Max Muermann gave a hands-on Domain Modelling session.

Around lunch, after hearing the moans of certain diehard Twitter fans and getting jealous of the guys working on Duke I whipped up Twatter, a local twitter clone, to satiate their narcissistic IM’ing needs. It seemed to have started a camping app frenzy, being checked out and mutilated to create both Rainbows and Guitar Zero.

Sunday was again full of sessions, and a loss of power ensured that everybody was on their toes and either hacking away at something on their laptop or sitting around the fire. For dinner the entire band of smelly drunken hackers headed to the local italian restaurant where a few wines, a speech or two and more conversation were thrown about. On return to the camp some were hacking, others were talking and I was so engrossed in convo around the fire I just skipped sleep altogether, figuring I had Monday off for a sleep anyways, staying up until we were greeted by a very hungover John Barton (seen below).

The cost of the event came to AU$95/person which covered accommodation; fresh, delicious, gourmet food; basic supplies; stationery; and, good times. After all was said and done the 40 paying Rails Camp hackers gave us enough to cover costs plus a little bit more, which we then used to subsidise Sunday’s dinner as well as some of the left-over t-shirt costs.

SegPub pitched in to help sponsor the tees, and though they camp too late for the actual event :( the t-shirts themselves rock. If you came to the camp, can’t get along to the Rails meetup tomorrow and haven’t given us your address already, shoot me an email so we can send your tee.

IMO Rails Camp 07 was a huge success, and I hope we can make it a regular 6 monthly event. Thanks to everybody who made it happen, the amazing 3 who donated their time and effort to feed us all, and to the 35 others who came along for the ride.

I’ll post a write up with all the apps that were worked on, links to their source and more tidbits soon! The code is available on the rails-oceania SVN repo.

and more…