Blog

What Is in a Name?

Team Avatar - Mikel Lindsaar
Mikel Lindsaar
May 8, 2013

Hi there Ruby friends :)

So, some of you might have heard of two community initiatives we have started over the past few months.

The InstallFest and the Development Hub.

Both of these were kicked off by reInteractive’s community manager Chlo√©.

When we started, we branded these, by putting “reinteractive” in front of them. We did this for a couple of reasons, (1) by putting our company name on the line and backing this event, it got a lot more attention than it might of otherwise and (2) it’s always good to have a bit of marketing :)

However, both of these events are growing in popularity and attendance. installFest has now almost passed 100 people setup with Ruby on Rails and Development Hub last week had about Matenia Rossides people rock up including mentors….

As our intention the whole time has been to make these community events and have anyone attend and help, we’ve decided to remove any reInteractive branding from the name of these initiatives.

Of course we will still sponsor these events and Chloé will still work hard at making them happen and will be the point person on driving them to continue to expand and grow, but we hope this change will make it more acceptable for anyone from any company (development shop, freelancer or otherwise) to come along, participate, attend or help out.

Also, it means we can start expanding this thing, news will be out soon about us starting the InstallFest in other capital cities in Australia and move out from there.

To reflect this change we’ve gone and updated our website and every site we have control over to refer to these events as the Ruby on Rails InstallFest and the Ruby on Rails Development Hub instead of “reInteractive Installfest” and “reInteractive Development Hub”. If you find an old reference to reInteractive directly in the branding, please let us know and we’ll get it fixed ASAP :)

Also, this means these events will always stay free and run at a cost plus basis to the sponsors. I’m also happy to talk with anyone wanting to run an Installfest in their location, we can provide guidance, materials etc and if you have a bunch of people, we’ll even fly our team there to help run it.

Thanks for all your support everyone and here’s to getting hundreds more people introduced and running with Ruby on Rails.

Mikel Lindsaar
Founder