I just returned from the most exciting 4 days in Europe to attend the Ostrava on Rails conference. After about 17 hours of travel I finally made it to Prague where I was supposed to have a stopover of several hours. It was all planned in advance. I was going to wait an hour in the Airport for Jamis Buck to arrive and we were going to take the bus downtown to do some sightseeing. Well in theory, theory is just like practice. In reality Frankfurt airport shut down due to a lightning storm.

With my plane canceled I got right in line at the ticket counter to get a seat assigned for the next flight. Natural Airport madness ensued. After making it to the front they told me that they can only assign seats about half an hour before the plane loads.

No problem, except that every time we managed to get within 45 minutes of take off the plane was delayed another half hour. Of course I could never stop being in line because someone else might get my precious seat. One complete boarding and de-boarding of the plane later, and after about 3 triumphant extra laps around Prague because of more bad weather in this area, we finally touched down with approx. 45 minutes to go until my train left for Ostrava; a 5 hour train ride with no good other trains leaving that day.

Good thing I travel light and don’t have to wait for my luggage at the baggage claim! Or so I thought. The people at the counter told me that the trip downtown to the train station would take about an hour! I couldn’t even make it in time after all this!

One thing immediately became clear to me: Prague’s taxi drivers mean business. After a short exchange that went something like this:

Stranded Rails developer: I need to be at the train station in 30 minutes! (add German accent)

Taxi driver: I’ll do it in 25! (imagine no words at all but him just throwing my luggage in his trunk and flooring the Volkswagen)

This Michael Schumacher of the taxi world manged to make it but had to employ the following strategy:

• He drove approx. 90% of the time on the street car tracks (illegal)
• He cut from the street car tracks over 2 lanes of traffic into a one way street (insane)
• He overtook a police car on the right hand side (illegal, insane)
• He drove 80km/h in a 30km/h area with cars parked on both sides of the street. (dear god)

After paying him well I ran into (or almost over) Jamis at the train station and we finally made it to Ostrava.

The conference itself went really well. It took place in a beautiful modern technology park in one of the suburbs of Ostrava. The English talks were well received, the audience asked great questions and was visibly enjoying itself. What really stood out was the perfect organization of the event. At no time were the foreign people allowed to be bored. There was always a program. Great dinner, great pubs, and always a designated driver. The event locations had signs pointing everyone in the right direction and the talks were cut off on time with a subtlety only matched by the Oscars (heh). The team was clearly not properly challenged by the event. I’m sure organizing a conference of 5 times the size would be just as easy for them.

The whole trip was a very enjoyable experience. Ostrava is a ex-coal mining town which is well on its way to re-inventing itself by events such as this conference and the Czech Republic is blessed by a lot of very passionate people. I expect rails and web development in general to hit a tipping point over there at any moment; all the fundamental things are there, all that is needed is a bit of entrepreneurial spirit and incorporation of start-ups.

Here are some thoughts which might help to accelerate this process:

• Centralize the rails community. There should be only one mailing list, one forum and one page which explains what rails is.
• Create a mailing list and launch local unconferences in the style of barcamp.org around the country.
• Follow up next year with a Central Europe on Rails conference and get the whole region involved!
• Deploy to railshosting.cz , they rock

Thanks again to everyone, especially Jiří, Lucie and Robert for being such great hosts.