After a busy week, I'm preparing to head off to Portland, Oregan for this year's RailsConf. Myself and a few colleagues from the software teams at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute will be flying out on Wednesday, ready to get started on Thursday morning.

With the full line up published, here are some of the sessions that have piqued my interest.

• Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper by Yehuda Katz
• "Design Patterns" in Ruby by Neal Ford
• Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing by Dan Manges and Zak Tamsen
• Small Things, Loosely Joined and Written Fast by Justin Gehtland
• Skynet - A Ruby Map/Reduce Framework by Adam Pisoni
• CRUD doesn't have an 'S' in it: Managing complex searching in Rails by Stephen Midgley

I'll be there speaking about how we're using Ruby and Rails as part of Sanger's new sequencing platform, too. If you're attending, feel free to drop by and say hello.

With an excellent line up, along with some great keynote speakers, this year's conference promises to be engaging and enlightening. Looking forward to it.