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.
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.
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.
FYI. This is no longer an issue. It was fixed even before ovi256 posted this comment which is why in the original post, he mentioned that the server was down. That's because his IP address had been blocked and a fix was deployed.
He later edited the comment to remove the part where he said that the site was down...
I got your email, too bad you decided to go this route rather than emailing me about it first. It's all good though. No hard feelings.
Thanks. We've added a mini-menu so that you can control which one of the views you want to see. In addition, once you click on one view, it will stop the auto-changing all together.
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. You've raised some great questions.
I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.
You should be convinced after reading our homepage that it is worth your money and maybe the current copy doesn't reflect that well enough. We'll keep iterating on that, gather more data points, analyze it, highlight success stories of integration, etc...