One of the best ways to expand your knowledge in any subject is to teach others. And because one of my goals is to become stronger in Ruby on Rails, I’ve stuck my neck out and will be speaking at four great conferences this year. Here’s the schedule so far:

April 13-14 – Canada on Rails
I’ll be discussing the story of llor.nu and talking about how it was my second Rails app. (Which isn’t just me putting a feather in my cap – it’s me saying that if I can do it, so can you.) Registration is still open, and the conference should be great.

June 22-25 – RailsConf
I’ll be talking about llor.nu again, but getting a little deeper into the technical aspects. This event is sold out already.

July 20-21 – Webvisions 2006
The schedule here isn’t firm yet, but the idea is that I’ll be building a simple game in semi-real time (the app will be prebaked to avoid any catastrophes and to make it possible to squeeze it into the hour format).

I’ll likely also be on a panel talking about the pros and cons of using both open source software and commercial software in web applications.

Registration for Webvisions is open, and an early bird discount is currently in effect.

July 24-28 – O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON)
I’ll be talking about llor.nu again and about how making the project open source changed the nature of the project.

If you’re attending any of these I’d love to meet you. I’m fairly gregarious and love meeting new people and enjoy talking about ideas. Also, I’m justly nervous about all the speaking. If I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t find speaking that interesting.