Austin Lone Star Ruby Conference: A Stranger in a Strange Land The author is attending the Austin Lone Star Ruby Conference as a PHP developer who hasn't worked with Ruby or Rails since 2008, and is looking forward to learning about new concepts such as MVC and unit testing. The conference features sessions on topics that are relevant to the web development world, including poorly structured code and how to make money from it. The author is interested in meeting other developers and learning from their experiences at the conference. They will be attending the opening reception and can be found via @CaseySoftware. The conference also provides resources for developers, such as documentation, ebooks, industry reports, webinars, and a developer community hub.