I intended the international technology conference Costa Rica Insight 2008 this year. The conference is sponsored by the Costa Rican government agency Procomer which helps to bridge gaps between Costa Rica and technology companies around the world.

This was an amazing experience! Speakers from Costa Rica, the US and other countries shared information about the world landscape, technology and commerce. Many countries that attended were definitely on pace with US technology adoption rates. The Internet revolution is truly a global movement (maybe no big surprise there).

Costa Rica has become a tipping point for companies wishing to interact with Central and South America. I can corroborate this through my own experience. A few years ago, I would have to talk about the government and educational system of Costa Rica as part of closing a deal that used near shore engineering resources. Now, this is no longer the case, thanks in part to pieces like this that explain the benefits of near sourcing. Many companies I spoke with plan to expand first into Costa Rica and then look to Costa Ricans to help guide movement to other countries.

Some of my favorite personal experiences:

• Discussing mobile e-learning with a company from Columbia that demoed mobile content and a mobile LMS.
• Brainstorming with an Indian CEO about open source platforms and Software-as-a-Service businesses.
• Speaking with a Mexican company about cost effective out-sourced co-location.
• Seeing a friend from Costa Rica who is building a very similar practice as mine but focused on his native country of Spain.
• Discussing multiple topics with representatives from the Jamaican government about what works for expanding in Jamaica.

There is so much to share and learn from a conference like this that it is hard to draw a finite set of lessons or conclusions. If I had too…

Near shore and off shore companies are technologically astute and therefore a viable choice to expand operations in a cost effective manor. You can reasonably expect to find knowledge and experience with the teams you hire. Experience is key to successful out-sourced development.

Market opportunities exist in many countries throughout the world. For example, personal finance online services in the US may be saturated but perhaps not so much in say Argentina. Similarly, much of the Software-as-a-Service market in the US is wide open to companies that are nimble and can find good local subject matter experts.

And most importantly, as with so many other aspects of life, thinking, working and collaborating with a global perspective is eye-opening to say the least and exciting to say the most.

I have created photo albums in facebook to share my experiences with all of you. I took a few images from the conference, of the beautiful country, and of my weekend get-a-way to Arenal to see an active volcano.

For myself, I actually attended as a speaker talking about Software-as-a-Service. I created an online version of my presentation. Please excuse the voice over as I was trying to keep the time down. I will add an online video of my talk when one becomes available.

I recommend a trip to Costa Rica in any event. It’s a beautiful country filled with interesting people. Best of all, you can learn a lot about the global technology movement if you plan your trip around this conference.

I was impressed by the sessions at this conference. The technical speakers were informed and clear. They were primarily experienced based speakers which means their knowledge was born from hands on work. I find people working in the field are more interesting, relevant and accurate when compared to those talking theory. Really, if you are considering developing in Ruby on Rails, I highly recommend you attend next year.

Joel Spolksy was a great keynote speaker at the conference. I remember laughing a lot and feeling like he had an interesting point of view for his talk. He really had a laugh at the expense of Windows. Funny that Bill Gates, in an email to his people, did not find the Windows usability thing all that funny. He should have heard Joel go through it as he struggled through patches, reboots and warnings just to upload some photos from his camera.

Overall, Joel made salient points about providing good feedback to users, keeping them in control of their experience and obsessing over all aspects of the experience. To me, this was a great statement about the whole “put it out there” movement in startups driven mainly by facebook applications. Yes, it is good to get user feedback sooner rather than later, especially before embarking on a mammoth development effort. But don’t sell yourself short by releasing a product that could be better with a little more effort and time.

I had mixed thoughts about the keynote speech from David Heinemeier Hansson. Ruby on Rails is truly an innovative combination. Before I give you my opinion of the talk, let me give you some analogies for what I think is innovative.

Developing in RoR is like building a house for the first time using a nail gun instead of a hammer. It’s like the first time you drove a car with power steering and power windows. It’s like the first time you created a server side product using Web technologies where as before you had to write code to handle requests, package data, manage connections and all that ugliness. It’s like the first time you took a flight from SF to LA when you used to drive because you were in college trying to save money. It’s like…(had enough???).

David is the founder of the RoR movement. He talked about the surplus created by having a superior tool as something developers should take advantage of for personal improvement. On the whole, this is not a bad concept. David felt that developers should use the time savings to sleep more, learn to whittle or even to fly a plane. Yes, it was mostly a humorous point. Our engineers should use the fact that they have a “better, faster tool” to take time to smell the roses.

However, in my opinion, this works against why Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing technology movements around. People are switching to RoR because it is faster. There really isn’t enough evidence yet to say it is better than other choices like Java with Hibernate and Spring or PHP with CakePHP. The surplus time should be used to extend this advantage and get more people and companies on board. After all, who would you hire to build your house? The guy swinging an old hammer or the guy with the nail gun and power drill? And what would you think if the guy with the power tools took a nap every day on site because he knew his tools were faster than the way they used to build houses? See my point?

The reason this language is selling today is exactly because of the faster angle. If you take that away, then you don’t quite have the history and track record yet to stand up against more established technologies. You have to get over the tipping point a little and then you can take a snooze.

Before I forget to mention it, Portland, Oregon is one rocking town. If you believe the whole “smell the roses thing” that David was emphasizing, I recommend you do it there at around 11 PM on a Saturday night. I know this has very little to do with the conference. Still, I have to give credit to the conference organizers for picking a cool location.

One goal for myself at the conference was to gather information about RoR scalability issues. I can now say that I am not worried at all after listening to a panel discussion from a group of guys responsible for about 4 billion Ruby requests a month. Representatives from EngineYard, Rails Machine, LinkedIn and AOL talked through their experiences taking RoR to the max. The big take away is that people need to think of scalability in terms of the entire system. The best coders in the world can’t make poorly designed data objects or under-powered hardware go any faster, for example.

We heard a keynote talk from Kent Beck later in the week. Kent is the visionary behind many innovative ideas including Test Driven Development and Extreme Programming. I recommend you Google Kent Back then read a lot about him and his ideas. And buy his books too! But make sure you form your own opinions which I think is his real goal for everything he creates. What is super impressive is how Kent sees the big picture, long term stuff. He talked about how real change, or rather the true fruition of his creative ideas, takes on the order of 20 years to go from concept to accepted practice. Talk about a visionary! Good call on Test Driven Development Kent.

In the end, I walked away from the conference convinced more than ever that Ruby on Rails represents a next generation approach to scalable Web development. I am a true believer after listening to a dozen sessions on various topics including scalability, project management, lessons learned from Web application development, complex searching and others. But the strength of any tool is in the people who use it. After all, a good carpenter is just as effective with a hammer as a nail gun.