Developer Day Boston wrapup

This past weekend was exciting, because it was the first instance of Developer Day held away from Viget's and Relevance's home territory - we took the show on the road up to Boston, with a lot of help from thoughtbot and the Microsoft NERD Center (which, incidentally, is an astounding space). It was both a lot of work and a lot of fun (at least for the half I was able to see; a minor emergency forced me to leave after lunch, so I missed the excellent afternoon talks), and I'm excited to continue taking Developer Day to places where smart people are doing good work. I've posted a general recap over on Viget Extend, with comments from some of the attendees, so I'll spend the remainder of this post recapping my talk: "Comics" Is Hard: Alternative Databases. I gave this talk at RubyNation a few months ago, and thanks to the feedback I got there, I was able to shift the focus a bit more towards what people wanted to see, with some great results (based on the SpeakerRate response). I'm very excited to see the talk continue to evolve, as I'll be giving it again in Chicago in a little less than a month - and beyond that, hopefully it'll inspire people to take a look (or another look) at alternatives to the traditional relational database model. There's a ton of exciting work going on with key-value stores, document-oriented databases, and more, and I think they're much more generally useful than the mainstream currently appreciates. And with all that said, here are the slides!