Because I have nothing interesting to talk about.

Honestly: I can’t think of a single thing that I think would be entertaining for a wide audience to listen to me talk about. I don’t want to submit a talk based solely on the notion that I’m supposed to be a mildly-famous member of the Australian Ruby community. What a crap premise to submit a talk on! What on earth could I possibly give a talk about and make informative for a large audience?

I’m not going to talk about writing a book because I already moan and bitch about that enough on Twitter. Plus, the actual act of writing a book isn’t exciting.

I’m not going to talk about documentation because nobody gives a crap about proper documentation, save for a very small select group of people and the people who are reading it. Don’t bullshit me. You know it’s true.

I’m not going to talk about engines in general because there’s already a great guide that covers 95% of what a conference audience needs to know. Chapter 17 of Rails 3 in Action covers it and a bit more also. No point giving a talk about something that’s already been written about. Personally, I go to conferences to see new, cool and interesting stuff. Not things that I can read about or watch on the Internet.

I’m not going to talk about my work on Spree because – and I say this without intending an arrogant tone – the work itself is self-evident and you don’t need to hear about it at a conference. I’m especially not going to talk about my thoughts on how to split up a monolithic engine such as Spree into smaller, easier to manage components. That checkout state machine work that I did? Excuse my brashness, but that was fucking awesome and I’m so damn proud of it, but I’m not going to talk about that either. Allowing Spree stores to choose their authentication backend? Please. It was just this thing I did. It doesn’t deserve a whole conference talk.

I’m quite happy, this time, to sit there and be an audience member who is learning about all the new, cool and interesting stuff other people are doing.