So I just came back from my 5 days stay in orange county (South California).

It was the first time I have been down to the US since the new visitor rules apply for german citizens. The fingerprinting and mug-shot went a lot smoother then I expected though; I have to admit that I had a bit of an esoteric idea of how these things are done. I followed the advice of my buddy Daniel and wore a suit for the flight. This usually gets you around any trouble with custom officers.

After arriving at the John Wayne airport near anaheim things instantly started looking bleak; Baggage was the last of plane to start this off, the clerk at the budget counter wouldn’t give me my rental car because I’m not 25 yet. Whatever… someone knew another rental service downtown which rents cars to people above 21. There is nothing wrong with company policies of this kind in my eyes. It would just be nice if expedia would have told me. In general expedia seems to be rather car unfriendly. I used the convenient feature to print out a route description from the airport to the hotel and thats where the day went even bleaker as those where utterly useless. 1 hour 20 minutes, 3 gas stations full of directions, a 5$ map and 21 miles later i managed to find the hotel and passed out.

The next morning I met with Solomon and company where I conducted a little rails workshop. I’m really sad that I didn’t bring any kind of camera with me, their office has got to be one of the nicest decorated places ever.

We worked on several of their cool projects. Most of the time we used the peer programming style where one person was on the keyboard and we all discussed the problems at hand and how to tackle them. I’m pretty sure the poor guys will have nightmares about test driven development tough. However we had a lot of fun on and off duty; Solomon took me for a fantastic drive around the area. Driving through Laguna Beach and Newport during a stunning sunset and great music was something to behold.

On Thursday I met with the people from Medsphere; Again a very cool company. They are working in the healthcare industry and wrote open source all over their banners. Their CTO Steve with whom I was in contact prior to meeting turned out to be a big ruby fan. I was delighted to discover that they have been using ruby for a long time for their integration and installation needs, cutting down installation times from 4 weeks or more which are usual in the industry to just one day. I learned a lot about this interesting industry and the daunting task of modernizing 25 years old code but also left some 0day code there in the form of a neat ajax based time tracker which I coded up on Friday. Medsphere is also the employer of Todd Berman of MonoDevelop fame who blogged about his first real encounter with rails.

On friday evening I met with Robert Bousquet, a fellow typo contributor, who drove up from LA for mexican food and light chatting.

The flight home was painless other then the fact that I had to get up at 4am. Overall a fantastic trip. I only met amazing people and Orange County is truly a gorgeous area. Its great to talk about rails with people face to face and its even greater to see the adoption rate increase so radically. New industries pick up rails daily. Its exciting times and it will only get better. Rails is where its at.