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MountainWest RubyConf 2008 Reflections

Posted by Marty Haught on Wednesday, April 02, 2008

It’s been almost a week since the MountainWest RubyConf 2008. I had a great time there and if I hadn’t been under the weather with a sore throat I would have had an awesome time. The talks were some of the best I’ve seen, especially for a conference only costing $100 for two days. I was going to post this earlier but I wanted to wait for some of the talks to be available via video.

So what were the highlights? First, there was several cameos of Darth Vader and his colorful sombrero. Then Rick Astley decided he should make several appearances. You can catch them yourselves in the videos of the presentations. Not many are up at this point but they’ll get there eventually.

Evan Phoenix got things started with his overview on Rubinius and the community. This was a cool talk and if nothing else presented some interesting ideas on how to organize an open source community around a project. It made me want to dive right into the Rubinius code and submit some patches! Ezra’s talk followed and covered Merb. I’ve been pondering using Merb in several cases and I was impressed to see how easy it could be to port some of our services to it (from Rails).

Now probably the coolest and most entertaining talk that totally came out of the blue was Giles talk on code generation. I was blown away. I definitely want to use Rubinius and Ruby2Ruby to do some cool jedi tricks now. Giles comments on the the self image of the Lisp community was just hilarious! If you only watch one video from this conference check this one out.

Several topics seem to run deep through the talks. Metaprogramming and more of an understanding of the dynamic nature of Ruby was explored several times. Patrick Farley’s talk on Ruby Internals was one such example that was very illuminating. On an interesting side note, I was reading Pro JavaScript Design Patterns by Harmes and Diaz on the the flight to and from the conference. The first several chapters of that book also cover the dynamic nature and internals of JavaScript and reminded me very much of Patrick’s talk. Exploring the prototype chain of a JavaScript object and how functions resolve based on how you construct/set those parent references. Very cool stuff indeed.

Another topic of interest was DSLs (which seemed to get mentioned in the metaprogramming talks too). Joe O’Brien’s talk focused on DSLs and I found enjoyable. Git was also mentioned a lot and it felt like a git lovefest. After seeing how people are using it, I now get it (ha ha). I was going to use git anyway but now I’m very excited about it. I’ll be converting my personal projects to use it now. I’m also tickled to see the git-svn library to allow me to use git with a subversion repo. Anyway, enough on that.

The other thing that I found interesting was a constant, but subtle, anti-rails sentiment. Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone’s appreciative of what Rails did and how many great ideas are baked in there. However, it seemed that people are recognizing that there are some alternatives out there that are superior. Sequel and DataMapper were both mentioned as alternatives to ActiveRecord. Merb and it’s focused, smaller footprint compared to Rails. I’m not going out and dumping all my Rails apps but I’m glad to see the Ruby ecosystem maturing with other alternatives that are still going and ripe with enthusiasm.

I think the other 160 people that attended also had a great time. What a bargain it was. I’m starting to think that regional ruby conferences are where it’s at. I’ll be attending RailsConf 2008 but I’m not quite as excited. It may simply be too big now, too corporate. We’ll see. At least most of my friends in the community will be there. RubyConf is probably still the best conference but I think if you haven’t considered the regional Ruby conferences you might want to look into one close to you. There are many of them now. Oh well, enough on all that. It’s late and I have a Radiant extension that needs some finishing touches.

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