Way out in San Francisco, I’m attending RubyConf 2009 from November 19 through November 21, and JRubyConf 2009 on November 22. It was a pretty significant financial investment (many attendees receive corporate travel funds) but I managed to make it out to San Francisco early Wednesday.
For me, the experience actually started just after I switched planes – I discovered that I had actually been sat next to the department head of the computer science department at Michigan Tech. My usual social-anxiety-ridden self, I sat and read for a while, listening to music. Then, in the spirit of RubyConf, I decided I had a duty to be outgoing. She and I talked for the majority of the flight about the structure of their program, difficulties faced in CS education, and the gamut of subjects. She really got me to reconsider whether I’ll be looking at grad school when my undergrad career is over.
Then, of course, I arrived in San Francisco, took the shuttle to the hotel, and discovered that the hotels are quite segregated. After about two hours of walking, I managed to find a little downtown area, bought some Subway, and it was a good day.
RubyConf began with Matz’ keynote – he discussed the idea of a “true” language. Matz (@yukihiro_matz) discussed the idea of creating a language that can solve 80% of the worlds’ problems – naming it ZPET (Zero-Point-Eight True). He argued that Ruby needs to improve on distributed systems, and needs to provide better solutions for functional programming, but that ultimately, Ruby could be the ZPET that the world needs.
There were some fantastic presentations throughout the day:
- Several Japanese Ruby developers gave talks expressing their concern about the communication gap between US and Japanese Rubyists, noting that the core team of developers working on the Ruby implementation conduct their work in Japanese – making collaboration difficult. They discussed some of the activities the Japanese Ruby community is involved in, and invited everyone to attend RubyKaigi in 2010.
- Sarah Mei @sarahmei gave a talk about her experience teaching Ruby to high-school girls. Using the Shoes framework as a platform, she was able to give some impressive insight into what students found easy, difficult, or just plain fun. She pointed out the fact that the stereotypes surrounding programming need to be updated, as programming “has more to do with language than with math.”
- Nathan Talbott @ntalbott spoke out against reliance on TDD/BDD alone to make a project succeed—it’s simply not the case. Nate identified a possible cause—that features requested by clients (or determined by developers) are not always perfect. We’re good at solving problems, but not knowing which problems to solveAs developers, we’ve become very good at solving problems, but not great at determining which problems to solve. He discussed the idea of Experiment Driven Development (EDD) to help address this issue. Using new frameworks like Vanity, which was just released today by @assaf, we can take a baseline product, and test conversion rates on different projected features – this helps direct developers into solving the correct problems, rather than arguing over which features need to be implemented, or have a net effect on the user experience.
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Oh yes, and there were flying robots!
After the regular sessions ended, I meandered on over to Kincaid’s Bayhouse, which featured a fantastic dinner, with some new friends. Truly, this has already been a fantastic experience, and I can’t wait for tomorrow’s sessions!
