In 2011, we had more than 100 people attend the first edition of the ErlangDC conference.
Since then, we've seen an uptick on the attendance of the monthly meetups which we've been having more regularly: http://www.meetup.com/erlang/. We've been getting between 12 to 20 people attend the meetups.
We are hosting one next week actually in which Jordan Wilberding will be talking about Credit Card processing for mobile apps.
The main goal of the conference is to improve the DC Erlang community. All the money that's left over is used to support the DC meetup group.
Is the bootcamp geared toward complete beginners (and by beginner, I mean someone with a computer science background, able to program in another non-functional language)?
The bootcamp is being taught by "Erlang/OTP in Action" co-author, and ErlangCamp instructor, Eric B. Merritt. It is based on our "Erlang Essentials" material, which we use at ErlangCamp to get ErlangCampers up to speed fast.
In addition, for more experienced Erlanguatans, we are planning hands-on on, technical mini-hacks/workshops to run in parallel to the "Erlang Essentials" bootcamp. More details forthcoming, as they develop, but we aim to make them interesting, informative, and fun.
The widgets are really useful. Your apps will not be very different if you use them with the same theme every time but I think it's ok for a demo to show customers during the Problem Interview phase.
I agree that the state model is a bit overly complex but if you go past the learning curve it can work well. Also there are ways to kind of bypass it and use an approach more similar to what Backbone/Spine does. There is a recent blog post by the SC team that shows you you can do that with 2.0 branch: http://blog.sproutcore.com/sproutcore-2-and-ajax/
A trick I learned from a friend while in grad school. When they have football games, walk around the tailgate parties right before the game is about to start, people will almost pay you to take their extra food so that they can get to the game. And it's usually pretty good food...
For better results, go next to the ones thrown by corporations. They usually order too much food and the employees do not care and do not want to bring the food back home.
I had a friend in college who went everywhere with two tupperware containers. When he was asked whether or not he wanted left overs he would feign a no, but as soon as he was asked a second time he would say "I guess so" and pull out his tupperware.
This is smart. After the contest, anytime you search for one of the terms in their dictionary on search.twitter.com, then @engineyard will show up (assuming there are a lot of entries).
All they have to do is make the dictionary include terms that potential engineyard customers might search for on Twitter.
Not exactly 'anytime' since Twitter search history doesn't go back that far. I can't find the link now, but I'm pretty sure it only searches up to about 30 days back.
