Gotham Ruby Conference
I got to attend GoRuCon today, a conference for Ruby/Rails hackers held at Pace University. I do so much Rails work on my own so it’s nice to get out and talk to other developers, see what they are up to and catch up on the current state of the art. The talks had a surprising relevancy to some of my current work, from new gems to check out to actual code that I can apply to my codebase. Highlights include Giles Bowkett refering to venture capitalists as ‘Muppet fuckers’ (i’m not even sure what that means) and someone doing a presentation using the scrollbar in TextMate.
On the technical side I was excited to learn about Seattle.rb’s ruby2ruby gem as well as hear Paul Dix’s talk on collective intelligence, where we learned that people who saw the Matrix would love the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Miss Congeniality is the most reviewed movie on Netflix. Paul has developed Basset, a Ruby gem for machine learning.
With ruby2ruby, you can do cool stuff like have methods discover themselves and implement dmap(), a version of Ruby’s map distributed amongst many servers. This is done by passing around code that is evaled on the distributed server.
All in all Ruby developers are good people, passionate about what they do and really open to learning from others. In no particular order, interesting things I want to keep an eye on:
- Giles Bowkett’s Blog
- WebRat, browser based testing
- Seattle.rb projects including ruby2ruby, RingyDingy and dmap (aka Bonjour for Ruby)
- Vlad the Deployer, a lightweight Capistrano
- Paul Dix’s Blog and Basset
- Linalg for Ruby
- Ruby/GSL
- Weka through JRuby
- Merb and Rubinius
- Cinema Redux
- Utility Belt which lets you do a history and an editor straight from irb
Update: Cory’s notes.
