This year’s first regional Ruby conference, the MountainWest RubyConf will be held March 16th and 17th in Salt Lake City, UT. It is accepting registrations until Feb 23rd. While it might be small in its geographical reach, it looks like a very big conference in almost every other way.

The keynote speaker at the conference is going to be Chad Fowler. From what he’s told me, his talk looks like everything you’d expect from a RubyConf organizer, respected Ruby and Rails trainer, published author, and jazz musician.

The conference has a great lineup of speakers too. These include: John Lam, Charles Nutter, James Britt, Ara T Howard, and several others.

As usual, the hallway track is perhaps the most important thing going, and we should have a great one. We already have people registered from California, Oregon, Illinois, and New York — not to mention the many locals from Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Colorado. Oh, did I mention that we’re also going to have a powder track? This is Utah after all, and there should be great skiing and snow boarding both before and after the conference.

One of the most exciting features of the conference is that we’re also hosting the second Alternative Ruby Implementors’ Summit. We’ll have representatives from Sun and Microsoft, as well as individual contributors, representing: cardinal, JRuby, rubinius, and RubyCLR. Not only will these hackers be meeting together to work on common issues, but they’ll be presenting an Implementors’ Panel during the conference, to discuss their work and answer questions.

There are a lot of ways that this looks like a big conference, but there’s one more way it looks small — price. Registration is only $50, and that will get you: a day and a half of presentations, a cool conference T-shirt, and a great chance to hang out with some of the best and brightest rubyists from the mountain west, and around the country.