This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: The Portland birthday celebration for Rails Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

We didn't get to make a big fuzz about the 1-year birthday of Rails on the actual day, July 24th. But this past week at OSCON more than made up for that in terms of celebrations. It was an overwhelming lovefest for what the Ruby on Rails community has created within this tiny sliver of time. Some of my favorite moments:

• Being recognized by Google and O'Reilly with the Best Hacker award for Ruby on Rails
• Matz, the creator of Ruby, labeling Rails the "killer application" for Ruby in his Yield to the Block talk.
• Tim O'Reilly highlighting Ruby on Rails as may well being the "Perl of Web 2.0".
• Agile Web Development with Rails being available in print, which fulfilled my long-standing goal of seeing my name on the cover of a book. Oh, and I got to sign a good handful of those with a Less Software tagline.
• Rich Killmer integrated his ActionStep component framework for Flash with Rails (much more about this shortly)
• Why the Lucky Stiff delighting us all with a fantastic multimedia show (that included several hilarious references to Rails)
• Fulfilling my goal of delivering a keynote on Rails to 500+ people
• Getting so many compliments for Rails by incredibly bright people that my ears have assumed a permanent color of bright red

It was a fantastic show and the best celebration we could have hoped for. Thanks so much to Nat Tolkington, Rael Dornfest, Vee McMillen, Tim O'Reilly and the rest of the O'Reilly team for believing enough in Ruby on Rails to let me deliver both tutorial, session, and keynote. And for giving Ruby a real (if totally overbooked) track this year — hopefully we'll have an even bigger room next year.

It's so exciting to see that after all the good times we've been enjoying through the year still haven't brought us to a peak. There's so much more to come. October will bring another big month of Ruby on Rails at conferences with appearances at JAOO, Web 2.0 (not directly presenting there, though), RubyConf, and EuroOSCON. And there's of course 1.0 around the corner. And those 7+ books under production.

But first there is vacation.