We really had a great time at the Lone Star Ruby Conference this past weekend. I’ve been to a number of conferences in the past for other technologies or programming languages, but this one really stands out for a number of reasons. It was not over-commercialized with tons of vendors trying to sell you something every time you turn around. Also, some of the biggest names in the Ruby world were there. And not just there, but they were hanging out with the group just like any other conference attendee. I love that these guys who are revered by most are just normal guys; they don’t put themselves up on a pedestal and have big egos.
There were several great talks but my favorites were:
- James Edward Gray II discussed lesser known Ruby gems, some of which I will definitely be using shortly.
- Evan Phoenix gave a fun and informative commentary on the past and current state of Ruby and the Ruby community.
- Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator and still guardian of Ruby, gave a great keynote.
- Gregg Pollack & Jason Seifer gave a whirlwind run through of innovative happenings and tools from the past year.
- Yehuda Katz demonstrated using screw-unit which is a nice BDD test framework for Javascript. I’m really excited about testing this one out on my own. We’ve all suffered through the countless hours debuging with firebug. I love that tool, but I look forward to not needing it as much.
- Glenn Vanderburg gave a great talk on tactical design where he layed out a compelling argument for teaching good design using a few simple and easy to remember principles.
All around, this was a great conference. The more I get involved with the Ruby community, the more I enjoy it. I even had the chance to catch up with some old friends. Here’s a picture of myself and Todd, one of my old co-workers from San Antonio.
After this weekend, we’ve been inspired to get started on a Ruby project that we’ve been talking about for some time. We have a large PHP application that has been growing for almost 3 years. It’s not the cleanest of designs and is built on top of an out-dated CMS. The trouble is that fixing it up with another PHP CMS or migrating to a PHP framework like Cake would involve a lot of time, and maintaining it as is has become very complicated. So, we’ve decided to re-write it from the ground up using Ruby on Rails. I plan to catalogue the experience here so stay tuned.
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It was good to see the two of you again. I agree this was one of the more focused conferences that I have attended. I definitely plan to attened next year.
Hey Todd! Thanks for stopping by the site. I hope to be there next year as well. But that depends on the date. There’s a potential conflict with a bike race we like to participate in, so we’ll just have to wait and see.