EuRuKo Mobile App

OMG IT’S EuRuKo WEEK!!

What is a awesome conference without an awesome app to keep you up-to-date?!?!

We are super happy to announce the EuRuKo 2012 iOS and Android app, created by the fantastic folks at Applicake.

The EuRuKo App will send you the latest news, agenda changes, party locations and fantastic local tips for things to do around Amsterdam.

You can find the app in the App Store or Google Play. And don’t be worried when the app requests permission for push notifications, we’ll use those to keep you up to date during the conference.

And again, a huge THANKS to our special friends at Applicake for providing us with this awesome addition to our awesome conference!

See you at the Hack Day / Boat Party / Conference.

Thijs and The EuRuKo Team

EuRuKo Friday Night Rumble by ClubJudge

When a company like ClubJudge, the world’s official hallmark for quality of nightlife venues is throwing a party, you just know it’s going to be great.

This time it’s no exception: the party will be held at the exquisite Club Home!

Since 2008, Club Home’s unique atmosphere has attracted thousands eager to soak in the laid back environment, right in the center of the city. Located a few hundred meters away from the conference venue, Club Home has 3 rooms available for mellowing out (Main room, Bedroom and the Living room).

Soundscapes will be delivered by the dynamic duo of Sander May & Tom Noah, promoters of KLIKK Music which organizes indoor and outdoor events as well as hosts of a monthly radio show.

Doors open at 21:30 and trust us: you don’t want to miss this one!

Founded in 2004 by passionate people with a very ambitious desire to take over the world, Clubjudge is the engine behind Betribes, the nightlife index of the whole of the Netherlands, Belgium and Ibiza. For years established institutions in the Dutch nightlife scene, ClubJudge and Betribes are the definitive authorities on nightlife events and venues.

Nedap and Finalist

Nedap is unlike most companies. Their focus is widespread (ranging from agriculture to security and healthcare) but the attitude is the same across the board: to create intelligent products, and to do it efficiently.

Established in 1929, and listed on the stock exchange since 1947, Nedap has a global presence. Being a relatively small company of 650 employees, they adhere to a horizontal structure so the quality of your work speaks higher than your rank. They are also always on the lookout for new talent. If you think you have what it takes to own your ideas and bring them to fruition in a quick paced workplace, check out their job openings.

They will be sponsoring the all-important coffee available at the venue!

Learn more about them on their website, check out their news or follow them on Twitter.

Finalist provides enterprise-grade content management, data visualization and integration solutions for big players across all industries.

They base their solutions on standards compliance and open source products and work with Java, Ruby and PHP. Their team is 80 strong, with presence in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Maastricht among others.

First set up in 1998, they have over the years accumulated extensive expertise in their area. They have also a very present regard for their workforce and stressful times during project deliveries are usually compensated with leisure time! Passion for what they do and open source technologies is ever present. Finalist also counts on a number of strategic partnerships.

Finalist will be sponsoring the fresh fruit available at the venue!

Find out more about them on their website or follow them on Twitter.

Gold sponsor breakdown! Meet EnterpriseRails

Our remaining Gold sponsor is EnterpriseRails, a top-notch hosting provider for Rails apps. They can also help you out with all stages of planning and developing Rails projects.

EnterpriseRails aims to allow you to focus entirely on your product and leave the rest up to them. Reliability, scalability, monitoring, backups and a comprehensive server management program including installation, automation and software updates on German-based servers. Their SLAs are rigorously upheld with a frantic passion to make your solutions sail smoothly.

Reduce the workload on your team and work with experienced Rails hosting supporters. Together you will work through security audits and secure your solutions’ operability.

Check out a short selection of their customers and their track record of presences at conferences.

10gen, CloudControl and Zweitag

10gen is home to MongoDB, a high-performance, open-source, document oriented database. They also provide consultancy, monitoring and training services for MongoDB. The company itself was founded by former DoubleClick and ShopWiki talent, in 2007, and their team has extensive experience in building large scale, quality systems. They’re backed by leading VC firms, and companies using MongoDB include Disney, Foursquare, Intuit, Forbes and many others.

More info about 10gen on their website or follow them on Twitter.

cloudControl is PaaS made in Berlin, Germany. Since 2009 they’re dedicated to supercharge development by building the best platform possible to help developers build better apps, faster. The cloudControl platform features agile deployments, rock-solid autoscaling infrastructure and pay-as-you-go pricing out of Amazon’s European datacenters. With the cloudControl Add-on market they bring developers all the third party cloud services they need easily integrate-able into their own apps and let them take projects from idea to product faster than ever before.

Be sure to check them out! Follow them on Twitter here.

Zweitag is a professional web development agency, founded 2008 by Peter Grosskopf and Julian Schneider. They are realizing projects using RubyOnRails, JRuby, Node.js and NoSQL technologies. They were the first organizers of a Railscamp Germany, in 2009. They built the already successful projects A Better Tomorrow, Zanox, and Sentres a platform for outdoor vacationers. Catch them during your attendance at the conference or their website. They’re also on Twitter.

EuRuKo 2012 Final Party by Scalarium

Picking the right location for the final party of the last EuRuKo (you know, because it is the end of the world) was a great feat in itself.

We wanted a place where you could talk (and not have to scream), a place where you could dance to great music, and a place where you could enjoy the last hours of the sun. We realized there is only one place in Amsterdam that offers all of this and more, and luckily enough they said YES to hosting us!

So we are happy to announce that this years final party is being held at the fantastic Amsterdam Roest!!

Amsterdam Roest is one of those places where you just want to spend your weekend. Starting out as a creative summer time experiment, it is now an Amsterdam summer institution. A typical day at Roest starts with chilling out in the sun, then maybe playing a game of frisbee with your friends, and later on sitting around the campfire when the sun goes down, and finally dancing that last bit of energy away.

And all of this is thanks to the AWESOME guys at Scalarium!

Scalarium is an automation solution to manage clusters on Amazon EC2 and other cloud providers. Scalarium powers several high traffic sites and has customers around the globe. They are based in Berlin, Germany and are looking for developers!

The party and drinks start at 9pm, and don’t forget to bring your conference badge because this is also your ‘free drinks’ badge for the night ;)

Update: The exact location of Roest is here. From Rembrandtplein it’s best to take Tram 9 in the direction of Diemen. Get out at the Alexanderplein stop and transfer to line 10 in the direction of Azartplein. Get out at the stop “1e Leeghwaterstraat”. From there it’s a short walk to the venue.

Have an AWESOME party,

The EuRuKo Team

Meet our Silver sponsors

Basho was founded in 2008 by a group of former Akamai employees and executives, and it’s fast becoming one of the biggest names in the NoSQL scene. They’re the brains behind Riak, an open-source and highly scalable distributed database, with a rather compelling feature set. They have also recently ventured into cloud storage with RiakCS, a Riak based, S3 compatible cloud storage technology that allows companies to offer public or private cloud storage solutions.

More info about Basho on their website or follow them on Twitter.

Your online customer support experience can very well make or break your product. Luckily, Zendesk has mastered quality, engaging support through their unique approach that has but one goal - excellence. Read more about why they’re so different here.

Read more about their success stories (involving names such as Dropbox, Groupon, Lonely Planet and Xerox) here and be sure to check out their blog too. Oh - and they have free trials! So, if great support is what you need, be sure to check them out. Follow them on Twitter here.

Soundcloud is the leading “social sound” platform, enabling you to easily share your sounds with your friends on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. Split between London, San Francisco and Berlin, the Soundcloud team delivers one of the most streamlined sharing and showcasing experiences available online today.

You can also access your content or new releases from the people you follow through their Android, iPhone or iPad award-winning apps! Follow them on Twitter here.

Speakers Part Twee (Two in Dutch)

Picking speakers for a conference is a hard job, you have so many things to take into account, like the theme, how many spots, experienced speaker vs first timer, local vs overseas, and the dreaded limited number of spots. Also, since we were using Pull Requests, the process was open, which meant we had lots of comments to take into account. (e.g. do we take a talk which has lots of +1’s or one with a few really good comments?)

Many times during the selection process we were left thinking ‘this sucks, we need to add more speakers!’ In fact, we said that enough times that we did just that, we created a mixture of 20min and 30min talk slots (each with 10 minutes for questions, and 5 minutes for changeover) just so we could add two more spots, and we think that it was worth it!

We are sorry we couldn’t accept more talks, because frankly we would have loved to accept all of them! If you would like further feedback please contact Josh and he will do his best to help.

So without a further ado, here are the final speakers for EuRuKo 2012!

Bruno Aguirre

Website - Twitter - Github

Bruno is an old school coder who enjoys complex problems and simple solutions. He works at Cubox in Uruguay helping startups make their dreams come true. His love for new languages is stronger than ever, with Ruby, Python and Javascript under his belt he is now starting to fall in love with Go!

Bruno has worked in the telecoms field for far too long, but he has learnt many awesome and tragic things, from different async protocols to how to become a cronic workaholic.

Secretly Bruno is a clown in disguise who likes to dress up, maybe you might see him at EuRuKo, or maybe you won’t, or at least you won’t know it :)

Sean Cribbs - Basho

Website - Twitter - Github

Sean is a pianist, software engineer, composer, philosopher, web designer, conductor, singer, teacher, and technology advocate. So I guess the question really is, ‘what isn’t Sean Cribbs?’

As a Software Engineer for Basho Technologies, Sean spends his time hacking in Ruby, Erlang, and JavaScript (and occasionally Python) on the client interfaces to Riak, Basho’s distributed, fault-tolerant database.

Random fact : Sean used to be a Choir director for 3 years, and we hear from a reputable source that he loves it when you sing Silent Night to him in falsetto!

Terence Lee - Heroku

Website - Twitter - Github

The fantastic Mr Terence works at Heroku maintaining the Ruby stack and a slew of OSS projects such as Bundler and Resque, as well as helping with the Rails Girls movement. When he’s not going to an awesome Heroku or Ruby event, he lives in Austin, TX, the taco capital of America, where everything is three times bigger!

Terence will be talking about the inner workings of Bundler, including the shortcomings of 1.0 and how 1.1 has helped make developers happier worldwide. On top of this, the future of Bundler will also be a hot topic.

And what is a good talk without a great story of the bundler and gemcutter teams working together to make bundle install significantly faster in 1.1.

If you don’t walk away with a better understanding of how bundler works then Terence will personally give you your money back!.

(Terence loves Friday hugs, EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK!, give him a big one when you see him!)

Eloy Durán - Fingertips

Website - Twitter - Github

Eloy, who was born and raised in this year’s host city ‘beautiful Amsterdam’, has long been working at the intersection of open-source Ruby and Objective-C/Cocoa. This combination has lead to his current job at Fingertips where he works on Web, iPhone, iPad and Mac OS X apps.

His open-source time is spent on CocoaPods, MacRuby, and many related projects.

If, at some point, you might think “who’s making that music?”, then it might be Eloy, who’s constantly beatboxing unconsciously. If you are up for it we can organize a beatbox showdown on stage!

Vicent Martí - GitHub

Twitter - Github

Vicent Martí has a name which is difficult to pronounce. Despite his main occupation as bananologist, he spends his spare time working full time at GitHub, where he builds tools for the people who build the Internet.

His dreams invaded by shadowy figures: pink ponies and raw pointers, he loves sharing his love for what he believes is beautiful technology. An European citizen (Spain, according to his passport), Vicent enjoys drums and yellow things and the sweet sweet smell of civilization.

We are slightly worried about his love for bananas, he even requested he have some available ‘backstage’, we didn’t even know we had a ‘backstage’!

Martin Rehfeld - Wooga

Website - Twitter - Github

Did someone say German engineering? Let me tell you about German engineering: It is boring! It is thorough, it is efficient, and it just works.

Martin has been doing this stuff for more than 20 years now. He tamed the very first home computers, made assembly code fit into HBLANK, and ran a BSD-based home server before Linux had even surfaced. Currently he is developing highly scalable backends for the Berlin-based social gaming company Wooga.

Want to show him you know your stuff? Bring along a ZX Spectrum with Wolfenstein 3D ported to it!

And the final big welcome too……

Mitchell Hashimoto - Kiip

Website - Twitter - Github

When we think ‘Mitchell Hashimoto’ the first thing that comes to mind for us is Vagrant, the awesome tool for creating and distributing virtualized development environments. In short, it makes VirtualBox awesome to use!

Mitchell spends his days as an operations engineer for a start-up company in San Francisco. He is Passionate (with a capital P) about all things open source, and boy does he show this passion with awesome contributions to the community.

We often hear crazy reasons why people got into programming, welllllll, did you know that Mitchell only wanted to learn how to code so he could cheat neopets!!! Without neopets, he may have never found computers!!!

Do you have a neopet? Maybe bring one to EuRuKo and get some special ‘hints’ from Mitchell ;)

---

So there we have it, all 13 speakers, including two amazing keynote speakers.

We are sorry for the delay in announcing this, and sorry that we couldn’t pick more, but join us in welcoming these amazing speakers to EuRuKo for 2012.

Huge <3 from the Nederlands!

The EuRuKo Team

Users Group Tickets

We’re thrilled to announce the results of the recent Ruby Users Group ticket initiative. We wanted to give something back to the users groups that play such a huge and important role in the community, so we dedicated a block of tickets that user group organizers could write in and request. The response was been fantastic, and we’re excited to announce that all the organizations which applied will get tickets.

Rubyists wrote to us from 20 different groups meeting in cities large – London, Tokyo, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Athens, among others – and small – Groningen, Lyon, Thessaloniki, Belfast, and many more. Reading through the descriptions of the users groups and their activity was inspiring to me – the Ruby community is huge and vibrant, and people are doing fascinating work everywhere. (By the 10th email, I started seriously considering how I could plan all future trips around users group meetings.)

We’re particularly excited to invite Japan’s most active users group, Asakusa.rb. They meet every Thursday (154 and counting) with a cast of Ruby heavyweights like you normally would expect to see at a conference – not just Akira Matsuda (creator of Kaminiari and CRuby core team member), who wrote to us, but also (to just pick a few from the list) the people behind WEBrick, test/unit, YARV, the 1.8 and 1.9 release managers, and not only Matz but Matz’s boss. Wow. Looking forward to that!

Another interesting group was the AvocadoDB project, a new open-source NoSQL project that’s beta-testing mruby, the new embedded Ruby project. We’re excited to hear firsthand about their firsthand experiences with the new implementation (perhaps a lightning talk?).

The complete list of participating cities, in alphabetical order: Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Cologne (2 groups), Düsseldorf, Edinburgh, Eindhoven, Groningen, Hamburg (2 groups), Kiev, London, Lyon, Madrid, Paris, Thessaloniki, Tokyo, Warsaw, Zürich.

We’ll be sending emails with coupon codes to all the groups in the next few days, and look forward to meeting them – and everyone else – in less than a month!

See you in Amsterdam!

The EuRuKo Team

A word from our sponsor: RailsLove

Lovers united: Railslove sponsoring EuRuKo!

Railslove sure lives up to its name - a household name on the german RoR scene, Railslove has organized two editions of Railscamp in their home country so far and their employees are also co-organizing this year’s Railsgirls_cgn in Cologne.

Their portfolio includes 9flats, Payango, Tipplr, Salesking and more.

Community presence is important for Railslove too, and they have a long standing tradition of mentoring and support (they were founded in 2008). And get this: they’re looking to add talent to their 16-strong team, so do check them out.

Railslove’s website is here and you can follow them on Twitter too.

Announcing the amazing Hack Day

Hey Everyone,

First off, HAPPY TUESDAY!!

We are very excited to announce that on Thursday the 31st of May, the day before EuRuKo kicks off, we’re organising a hack day for anyone and everyone to attend, even if you can’t make it to EuRuKo itself! Join us to hack on your favorite open-source project or another fun/useful/yakshaving endeavour.

Have no idea where to start? Don’ worry, some awesome people will be present to help you along: Jon Leighton (Rails core), Xavier Noria (Rails core), Charles Nutter (JRuby core), Brian Ford (Rubinius core), Terence Lee (Bundler core), and as a last minute treat, Konstantin Haase (Sinatra and Travis CI core).

This is all being made possible by the fantastic sponsorship by Heroku. Many thanks and lots of high-5s to them!

The day will start at 10am and end around 4pm. The venue is in the process of being confirmed, but will be in the centre of Amsterdam. We will provider coffee, water, soft-drinks, snacks, and the all important lunch during the day.

The number of spots is limited, so be quick! You can register for the hack day here.

Update: The venue for the Hack Day is Lab 111. It’s a fantastic bar/restaurant that’s in the Smart Project Space art galery. It’s located close to the Vondelpark. Click here to find out how to get there.

Hope to see you at the hack day!

The EuRuKo Team

Platinum is beautiful - Wooga

We’re proud of having Wooga on board.

Founded in 2009 in Europe´s technology hub, Berlin, Wooga is the third largest social games developer in the world. Wooga’s 190 employees from 35 nations create high quality games for Facebook and iOS, with a specific focus on emotional character development, usability, and superb localization in seven languages. Wooga is committed to creating innovative and original game titles for players of all ages, bringing millions of users around the world together through a world of gaming. Wooga´s free-to-play Facebook games are enjoyed by around 50 million active players per month - 70% of which are women.

Wooga has released six games so far: Brain Buddies, Bubble Island, Monster World, Happy Hospital, Diamond Dash and Magic Land.

Also Wooga’s crew has had nice talks at conferences before. Check out Tim Lossen’s fight at Wroclove.rb “JRuby vs. Rubinius (Fight)”

And if you want to join the crew, just ping someone at the conference or just visit http://www.wooga.com/jobs/

A word from our sponsor: Lunar Logic

We’re excited to welcome Lunar Logic Polska as one of our Gold sponsors for this year’s EuRuKo.

Founded in 2004, LLP’s quality, flexibility and affordability quickly made it one of the top Ruby on Rails players in Poland. Not your standard offsourcing partner, the professional team they have on deck is experienced in Agile practices and best practices upholding.

They’re the master minds behind Kanbanery (an elegant Kanban board), Qwerly (a social utility for people discovery) and LegalRelay (a legal software reviews service) among many other projects - check out their portfolio here.

For more info on LLP, head on to their website or follow them on twitter.

The Wooga-EuRuKo-ASCII-Art-Golf-Contest!

Only a few weeks until EuRuKo, we are all very excited. In the meantime, to get you in a festive Ruby hacking mood, we have something very special for you:

Our awesome friends and supporters over at wooga launched a Ruby golf contest. You can win one of four tickets to the conference, including accommodation. How awesome is that?

So head over to their site to learn more about the contest. Happy golfing everyone!

Speakers Part 1

When we opened our Call for Proposals using GitHub Pull Requests we were astounded by the response. Apart from the sheer number and quality of proposals, everyone seemed to love the transparency of using such an open and collaborative medium.

With the 1st of June fast approaching, and several other amazing conferences also releasing their speakers, we were running a little bit behind schedule. We are very sorry for the delay, but we hope to make up with some fantastic speakers!

So without further ado, here is the first lot of speakers for EuRuKo 2012!

(Please note, the second lot will be blogged about on Thursday.)

Key note speakers

It is with great pleasure to announce our two awesome Keynote speakers for this year : Yukuhiro Matsumoto (Matz) and Geoffrey Grosenbach.

Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby Chief Architect, Heroku

Website - Twitter - Github

Matz needs no introduction. As the creator of the beautiful and elegant language we all love, we are honored to have Matz joining us for this year’s EuRuKo.

Although, did you expect anything less? ;)

Geoffrey Grosenbach - Peepcode

Website - Twitter - Github

Geoffrey Grosenbach has been designing and developing web applications since 1997. You might recognize his soothing voice from the Peepcode screencasts, of which he is the founder. Or maybe you also know he is nuts about road cycling, a hobby and so much more!

Residing in Seattle, WA, the birthplace of grunge music, maybe try sharing your favorite coffee tip, or even mention the ‘amazing’ Starbucks ;)

Speakers

Brian Ford - Rubinius Developer, Engine Yard

Website - Twitter - Github

Brian is probably best known for his role on the Rubinius team, where he has worked full-time for the past four years thanks to Engine Yard. He has also created the RubySpec project to improve the standards for high quality, consistent, and compliant Ruby implementations, and is focused on improving Ruby and thereby making the lives of developers even better.

Want to chat him up? FYI he enjoys whisky but will accept good wine in a pinch.

Charles Nutter - JRuby Architect, Engine Yard

Website - Twitter - Github

Charles has been programming most of his life, as a Java developer for the past decade and as a JRuby developer for over six years. He co-leads the JRuby project, an effort to bring the beauty of Ruby and the power of the JVM together. Charles believes in open source and open standards and hopes his efforts on JRuby and other languages will ensure the JVM remains the preferred open-source managed runtime for many years to come.

Did you know Charles has an awesome beard? Maybe you might both bond over beard grooming advice!

Rick Olson - Alchemist, Github

Website - Twitter - Github

Rick is a developer at GitHub, a self-diagnosed REST nerd, bleeding edge DB enthusiast, with an active OSS profile. Rick calls himself a gif artist and a crappy Looptastic DJ who enjoys reading comic books. But really, if you know Rick, he loves his Dubstep :)

Want to pick Ricks amazing mind? Quote some Dubstep lyrics! “hey Rick, I really love that song that goes ‘boom boom waap waap boom boom woosh woosh’”

Konstantin Haase - Berry Sparkle Lord, Travis CI

Website - Twitter - Github

As current maintainer of Sinatra, Konstantin is an Open Source developer by heart. Ruby has become his language of choice since 2005, and with an open source addition, he regularly contributes to different projects of all shapes and forms like Rubinius, Rack, Travis, Rails and MRI. Konstantin is even rumored to be part machine!

Interested to know what goes on inside his head? Bring a toolset!

Roy Tomeij - 80beans

Website - Twitter - Github

Roy has been a front-end specialist for almost a decade. As one of the co-founders of consultancy 80beans here in Amsterdam, he weaves HTML5 and CSS3 magic on an hourly basis. As well as being in love with front-end meta languages like haml, sass and coffeescript, he is all about a sweet mixture of function and form.

Fun Fact: We hear Roy loves a good vodka or 10 ;)

And last but not least!

Elise Huard

Website - Twitter - Github

Living in the land of muscles, and Jean Claude Van Damme, Elise has been a software developer in Belgium for more than 10 years. She has used a variety of languages on a variety of environments, and has spoken at a variety of conferences all over the world.

We hate to admit it, but Belgium makes some awesome beers, let her know how much you love a Duvel or Chimay.

We are so excited to be welcoming these fantastic speakers to Amsterdam, but hold onto your seats because more will follow soon!

Big <3<3<3 from the EuRuKo Team!

Did someone say more tickets?

Hi Everyone,

How are you all? Excited? Wanting more information? Still want a ticket? Well, I think we can help with that!

We are sorry for the silence from the EuRuKo camp as of late, it has been a mixture of jobs, life, and EuRuKo meetings. We have heard your pleas on twitter, and it is time to break the silence and give you an update with what is going on.

A Quick Recap

We have had two batches of tickets go on sale, the first lot went in 60 seconds, the second went in 45 seconds, BUT they did not sell out straight away. The trick is that the tickets get ‘reserved’ in less than a minute, but if people lose their browser session, or don’t complete the transaction in time, then the tickets become available again. So wait for 15 minutes next time and see if any become free!

So far 300 tickets have sold, as well as 20 supporter tickets. We still have two more batches to go (yes, you read that correctly) but we are going to do things a little differently this time.

Batch #3

On Monday the 16th of April another 75 tickets will go on sale at 8pm CEST.

This is the final batch of tickets like this. We realize that this feels like an annoying lottery for many people, and it will always be an issue when you have a cheap conference with LOTS of people trying to snag a ticket. That is why we are pleased to announce ….

Batch #4 - User Group Tickets

Now I hand you over to Alex Koppel, the creator of the Koala Facebook gem, and the man behind the curtain when it comes to organizing this initiative:

The response to EuRuKo has been amazing, with both batches of tickets sold out almost instantly. Rubyists are coming to Amsterdam from 23 different countries; participants from as far afield as Australia and Uruguay will be joining big contingents from Germany, Poland, Spain, and many other European countries.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve dedicated 50 additional tickets for Ruby Users Groups across the world. Users groups are an incredibly valuable part of the Ruby community, and this is our way of making sure we get a great mix of developers from every continent, even Antarctica ;)

If you run a group you can write to me at alex@euruko2012.org for a chance to get a ticket. You’ll still have to pay for the tickets, but they’ll be guaranteed, no frantic refreshing required. Tell us a little about your group, your meetings, and what been talked about recently – no need to be formal, though, it’s not an RFP :)

We’ll be collecting information from now until the 27th of April at alex@euruko2012.org. After we’ve had a chance to review your emails, we’ll contact the groups that will get tickets to make arrangements; we’ll try to include as many different groups as possible, though we can’t guarantee that everyone will get one.

See you in a few months!

Alex and the EuRuKo family

Hotel recommendations

So after hitting refresh for 10 minutes you snagged yourself a ticket to EuRuKo, and now you are thinking: “How should I get there? Where should I stay? What should I wear?”, well, we can’t answer all of those questions for you, but we can recommend some great places to stay while you are in town :)

Hostels

Trying to do Amsterdam on the cheap and still have a great experience? Check out one of the hostels below.

Hostels are also great because you can get 6 person rooms for you and all your friends to stay in. And really, how long are you actually going to be sleeping for?

Stayokay Vondelpark

Close to the conference venue but also very popular so get it while there are still rooms available!

Stayokay Zeeburg

Another great hostel, but a little out of the centre of Amsterdam so not as busy.

Direct connection with the conference venue via tram 14.

Hotels

Want a more private sleeping arrangement? Or maybe your better half is going to come to Amsterdam with you? We have some Hotel picks for you then, or check out ebooking for a full list (with some reviews of course).

Hans Brinker Budget Hotel

Inexpensive and walking distance distance from the conference venue.

DoubleTree by Hilton

Expensive but great location next to Amsterdam’s Central Station

NH Hotels

Expensive but NH has a couple hotels crawling distance from the conference venue

Alternative

Dutch architecture is great to look at, but why not stay in it as well?

Maybe you are looking for a house boat, or an apartment for you and some friends to stay in, or a nice place in the Jordaan for you and your family? Whatever the case, or whatever the price range, Airbnb has got you covered!

Happy booking! The EuRuKo team

Next ticket batch and CFP

It’s been a while since our last update, but a lot of work is being done behind the curtains.

We’ve arranged enough parties to have everyone busy during their stay in this vibrant, magical city, ensuring that you’ll never get bored, although we highly doubt that would ever happen :)

Tickets sale

Several people have reported some discrepancies about the announcement of tonight’s ticket sale and the CFP closing.

We used CET for the announcement but CEST should have been used instead. Therefore, to clear out any confusion, all times from now on will be announced using the CEST offset, so the tickets sale is tonight at 8:00 PM CEST. We are sorry if this is confusing our friends outside of Europe but please bear with us, DST is supposed to save us millions of € a year, or so they say…

Call for proposals

We are amazed by the amount of positive feedback we’ve received regarding the system we use for proposals and the amount of amazing proposals we’ve received is making the decision taking more complicated, so keep it up!

So far we’ve received more than 85 proposals on GitHub!

Deadline

The CFP will close this Friday, 30th of March at midnight (CEST). Make sure to submit your pull request on time!

Boat party time

The starting time for the boat party on the 31st hasn’t been set yet but it’ll most likely be around 7:00PM/8:00PM (CEST) – We’ll give you more details as soon as we possibly can!

Thanks

Finally we want to thank all the people and companies that are making this possible, you guys are the best! We’ve sold more than half of the supporter tickets so far, so once again: Thank You!

The EuRuKo Team

Gone in 60 seconds

Ticketing update

On Tuesday night something great happend, all 150 tickets from the first batch pretty much went flying out the door within 60 seconds!

You might not have known though that Amiando releases non-sold reserved tickets after 15 minutes, so if a purchase isn’t complete then the ticket is released back into the pool. The main point to note is that “All tickets have been reserved” does not mean the tickets are sold out yet :)

Ever wondered what the trafic looks like when hundreds of people are going crazy pressing the refresh button? Good news, Patrick Hüsler from EuRuKo 2011 set up Hummingbird for us and recorded everything! Check it out:

Boat party tickets

As if we didn’t already know, the boat party is going to be fantastic! Almost all attendees bought a boat party ticket so you don’t want to miss this! And of course, all drinks will be sponsored by our amazing friends at GitHub!

Several people who didn’t select the boat party ticket option, or something went wrong during the checkout process, have already contacted us asking to get a reservation sorted out. Don’t worry, we will get you tickets, we will have more news about this next Friday (23rd of March). For now, sit tight and relax, we won’t forget you :)

We have also had a few emails asking if there is room for partners on the canal cruise, this is yet to be determined and we hope to know more after the next batch of tickets go on sale. We can not promise anything, and we ask for patience on this matter as there is still a lot to sort out.

As for the time the boat will depart, it will be between 6pm and 9pm. This isn’t set in stone, but if you are planning flights make sure you arrive with time to spare.

This also brings us to another important point, there are plans for a hack day on the Thursday, more details to come in the next couple of weeks, but we thought we should tell you now before it is too late ;)

Next ticket batch sale

Better cancel your soccer training, girls night out or dinner with your partner because the next batch of tickets will be released on Wednesday the 28th of March at 8pm CEST. Lets try to set a new record this time and sell out in 30 seconds ;)

We can’t wait to see you all in Amsterdam!

EuRuKo Pre Party by GitHub

We’ve got some more awesome news for you!

This year we wanted to do something special, something not seen at any other EuRuKo, and what else would you expect in such a wonderful city like Amsterdam.

After a lot of brainstorming we came up with a great idea!

One of the things which Amsterdam is famous for is our lovely canals, so why not give you all the oppurtunity to enjoy this on the best way possible?! We know how : while drinking great Dutch beer!

That’s right, this year’s EuRuKo pre party will be on the lovely canals of Amsterdam! And the best part is, the drinks will be sponsored by GitHub!!

How to attend

Tickets will cost 15 EUR for the two hour cruise, and it is important for us to know numbers in advance, so instead of dealing with money and tickets on the night, you can instead reserve a spot when buying your conference ticket.

And just a reminder, the first batch of tickets will go on sale TOMORROW!

Hope to see you on board!

The EuRuKo Team

Welcome to EuRuKo 2012

The countdown has started! EuRuKo 2012 is around the corner and it's high time we wrote you a blog post to let you know what is going on!

Let me start off by giving everyone a big warm welcome to the EuRuKo Blog, or as we like to call it The Hype Machine. This is where our weekly updates will go, with everything from sponsors to the all important drink ups.

This years EuRuKo will be awesome, with a capital A! First off, it is being held in beautiful, amazing Amsterdam filled with lovely canals, a colored nightlife, and some very relaxed smoking laws.

We have a fair bit of news to share, so let's get started!

If you have been keeping abreast with the twitter account you know that our official Call for Proposals (link to cfp repo) has opened. We thought to ourselves, We use GitHub on a daily, if not hourly, basis, why not use it for the talk proposals as well?!?. So now you can fork the EuRuKo talk proposals GitHub repo, add your proposal, then send us a pull request! Or, if you want, why not comment on another talk proposal and give some feedback, or even just a +1 :)

We have an amazing venue for this years event. The Tusinski Theatre is not only a beautiful theatre rich in history, but it is in the heart of Amsterdam. The theatre spans three levels, although we will only be using two of them, which allows us to increase the number of tickets this year to 550 (including sponsors and volunteers).

Which brings us to the all important question: when do tickets go on sale?

On the 13th of March, at 8pm, 150 tickets, including 30 micro sponsorship tickets, will go on sale through Amiando. This will be the first of three ticket releases, not including a user group ticket release, which is a special surprise with more details to follow soon.

The price this year will be 65 EUR including 19% VAT. This is an increase from last year, but sadly it was inevitable due to the high prices of Amsterdam. We will make it up to you by putting on the best EuRuKo this world has ever seen though ;)

I also want to send some huge love to the fantastic team behind this years EuRuKo. We will have a blog post up soon to introduce you to the team, but until then why not send them a tweet to say thanks, or even better, follow them on twitter :)

Bruno Antunes, Thijs Cadier, Kevin van Dijk, Norbert Crombach, Danny Hiemstra, Justin Halsall, Josh Kalderimis, Jan Kus, Chris Obdam and Timon Vonk

If you have any questions or comments, don't be afraid to send us an email or tweet us at @euruko.

A big jumping High 5 to everyone!

The EuRuKo Team