Just ran into a very annoying git error message that took a few minutes to figure out. I was merging changes from someone's Spree fork in Github into my master. I first pulled down their changes in a separate local branch. The change involved renaming two files due to a case issue in the filename.

The changes pulled down fine but git would complain when I tried to checkout my master branch again. What's weird about that was that git was saying that such and such a file "would be overwritten by merge." I wasn't trying to merge, just checkout the master branch (and then merge as a separate step.) 'git status' did not show any changes in the index (unsurprising) but I was basically stuck.

Here's how I fixed things. I did 'git checkout -f master'. Apparently the '-f' option was what I needed. Once I was back on the master I ran 'git status' and saw that the two files in question were deleted (as I had been warned about) and that these changes were considered untracked changes as far as git was concerned. The new files were not yet in the branch but that wasn't exactly a surprise. Next I did 'git merge branch-in-question' and that fixed everything to the way I wanted it. The files were renamed, the commit from the fork was in my log and there were no longer any unstaged changes.

Last week I attended the first Ruby Nation conference here in the Washington, DC area.  It was a two day affair with just a single track (all of the presentations were given in a single large lecture hall.)  Overall the speakers were pretty good and the topics were fairly interesting.  I would say that the presentations were not as polished as what I saw at Railsconf but the topics were plenty interesting.

I definitely enjoyed the smaller size of the conference.  It was easier to chat with people between sessions and I met a lot of interesting people who work in the same geographical area as myself.  I had the opportunity to show Spree to several people.  There seemed to be a lot of genuine interest from the people who saw it.  One person suggested I do a lightning talk on it but the talks were already full.  Next year I'll definitely sign up to do one since my informal presentation in between sessions generated a small crowd around my seat in the lecture hall.

Overall I would recommend Ruby Nation highly.  You can't beat a two day conference for $175.  Apparently its going to be held in June next year.  I think that timing is less then ideal with RailsConf happening in June as well.  The late July timeframe seems to make a lot more sense to me.