I was recently given the opportunity of attending <a href="http://www.rubyconf.org"event_item">Ruby Conf 2009</a>. It was a lot of fun being with a few hundred of my Rubyist peers. You can now see for yourself via the recently-uploaded session videos or the RubyConf-in-22 minutes video. Or read other RubyConf wrap-ups. Due to the sheer amount of information, my personal wrap-up here is in the boring at-this-time-I-saw-this format. I’ll try to have links to each talk, but they aren’t all available at the time of writing this – I’ll try to update the list later.
Wednesday night I received my ticket via email from a nice guy in New York who couldn’t go at the last minute. Lucky for me!
Thursday 9am the conference started with a keynote from “Matz” (Yukihiro Matsumoto) the creator of Ruby. It was not the most interesting talk I’d heard, but everyone listened politely. Immediately after Matz’s talk I picked up my free Poken device to track the people I met. The Poken was kinda fun at the conference but not very useful unless you’re near a lot of new people who also have them. But at the conference it was kinda fun to touch someone’s Poken to capture a digital business card.
Thursday 10am I attended the BERT and ERNIE talk from one of the GitHub guys, which was fairly close to what I’d already read of the new GitHub server infrastructure. Its amazing what you can do with smart people and enough servers to effectively distribute your workload.
Thursday 11am to 4pm I listened to talks on Bits and Bytes, DSLs and Flying Robots – the quality of these talks was inconsistent and there was not much material I wasn’t already aware of, but I met some interesting people at each session.
At 4pm Thursday was a talk on MongoDB that cleared up some misconceptions I had. This dovetailed nicely with the Friday 9am “Not Only SQL” talk about other non-SQL database options. Unfortunately, I don’t see any obvious winner over my current use of PostgreSQL – there probably is a better one for our particular needs but the cost, in time, of trying the various options seems prohibitive.
Thursday 5pm was my last session of the day, with a presentation on Experiment Driven Development. The basic idea is that rather than relying on your best guess, or your Marketing guy’s best guess about a new feature, you just test both new ideas on actual users before committing to a definite plan of action. He hasn’t put up any slides for his talk (he has a 1 month old baby at home) so you’ll have to rely on my judgement that it was interesting. For me, it means that I’ll be looking for opportunities to capture metrics to measure user response to system changes. I expect the rest of the ConFreaks’ videos will be online in the next week or two.
Rather than stay for the 8pm Lightning Talks I went with my friend Dan and his friends to a yummy tapas restaurant in the Mission.
Friday I learned more than I wanted to know about ongoing improvements to the RubyGems system, partial evaluation of Ruby (pseudo JIT compilation) and an alpha-level persistence layer called Aqua.
At lunch on Friday (and again on Saturday), I watched a fun programming competition to see which team could refactor a chunk of code better and faster. It was all very subjective, but gave a real-world view into how pair programming actually works and other people’s ideas on what makes for a consistent test-driven process.
Friday 2pm was a talk on the latest in MacRuby, a very promising Ruby VM running on top of Objective-C using native objects and garbage collection. It looks promising but I won’t play with it until the 0.5 release is officially out (any day now).
Friday 3pm was Jim Weirich’s talk on SOLID Ruby that expanded on some ideas about Object Oriented Programming that were originally described by “Uncle Bob”. He is a good speaker who really knows his topic so my high expectations were happily met.
Friday 4pm was a fun talk by the always-interesting creator of GitHub, Chris Wanstrath, on what Rubyists can learn from Python.
Friday evening I attended the Startup Crawl, eating tasty food, drinking beer and meeting a few people. Scribd had the best food; Heroku had the best ambiance (and one of their guys solved a technical problem I had on one of my personal sites – nice bonus – instead of telling me to RTFM).
Saturday I woke a bit late but made it in time for the Clojure talk – it seems like a good language for concurrency, but not nearly as easy to write as Ruby. Tim Bray has a nice ongoing series of blog posts on various languages that focus on concurrency. He recently delved into Clojure and it looks somewhat promising (but there is no free lunch).
Saturday 11am I attended an interesting talk on scaling called Synchronous Reads, Asynchronous Writes. Paul Dix went on at length on the various strategies his site has used to improve performance by off-loading work to services that allow eventual data consistency. It looks like a fairly standard infrastructure once you get to a large number of servers but it was good to hear the nitty gritty details discussed.
My last session was Gregg Pollack’s discussion of a number of performance-related gems and plugins. It was essentially what he covers in his screencasts, but since I hadn’t seen them it was well worth hearing it in person. I’ve now subscribed to his Ruby5 podcast which I might finally listen to on the train.
All in all, it was a very good conference. I met, in person, a lot of interesting people that I’d been following in various ways (twitter, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.) and I’d love to go again next year – but I’ll try to get a ticket when they go on sale instead of the night before!