Kevin W. Gisi

The final day of RubyConf 2009 was a poignant reminder of _Why: why we love Ruby, why we go to conferences, and why the Ruby community is unlike any collection of developers. This was perhaps embodied best by the Programming with the Stars event which ran during the lunch period of each day of the conference.

Developers passionately watched as pairs competed in a paired-programming event to demonstrate good coding practices and refactor things for the better. Every individual in the room was excited and involved in considering best practices for development in Ruby—in what other community are individuals so excited about not only getting work done, but doing it in the best way possible? A big thanks to Corey Haines (@coreyhaines) for organizing this event!

The day had several great talks as well.

• Stuart Holloway urged Rubyists to consider what their next language was going to be—specifically, by discussing things he loved about Clojure. Stuart reminded us that we’re passionate developers, and our enthusiasm doesn’t need to be constrained to a specific language domain—get out there and have fun with something new.
• Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove) and Ryan Davis brought the house down with their Worst. Ideas. Ever presentation. Some of the fantastic topics included optimizing web performance by writing in assembly, “Ruby doesn’t scale…but XML scales like a boss!”using PHP for Rails views, and making Ruby more “enterprise” by converting it to XML (because, as everyone knows, Rails doesn’t scale, but XML does). The mentioned that they actually did encounter a few bugs in Nokogiri and other libraries, just in writing the samples for this project—bugs that likely could have gone unchecked otherwise. The overall message: do stupid stuff; play with fire; having fun with a language is hardly something to be avoided—even if the overall product might not have any real value.

As the _why-esque art from the RubyConf whiteboard—along with all the presentations from the event—remind us, Ruby is fun, Ruby is never finished, and there are always people who look forward to working with you in the community.

Thanks to everyone involved for a truly phenomenal RubyConf 2009.