eRubyCon - Day 1 (and Columbus Ruby Brigade) recap
I'm sitting here at the beginning of Day 2 reflecting on Day 1. It was a fantastic day. I met a lot of fun folk and learned a lot. There were 4 talks yesterday by two speakers - Jim Weirich and Justin Gehtland. Jim Weirich's first talk "Shaving with Ockham" made the point that "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." It was a history of languages and how they have come from simple to extraordinarily complex to simple again. And how there are a ton of complex languages out there. As always, Jim was fantastically informative, funny and motivational. Justin Gehtland's first talk titled Microsoft and the DLR. It was the first time that I had heard him talk. I was really impressed with his insight, wit, humor and presentation abilities. He distilled a lot of myths about the DLR, talked about how the Microsoft Open Source Licensing works, possible performance benefits of the DLR, things that had to happen to .NET to make it work and much more. It was an impressive talk and I'm hoping to steal parts of it for sessions that I do locally around the district... Of course, he's got a slight leg up here because at one point his mentor was John Lam who's creating IronRuby. Jim Weirich's second talk was his "10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know about Ruby" which is well defined and reviewed. Great session. Justin Gehtland's second talk was "Security (CAS and OpenID)". It was a great talk. It as surprising to me that he didn't know about CardSpace. I wasn't actually the one that brought it up - it was Alexey Verkhovsky who's a ThoughtWorks employee living in Canada working on various Open Source projects. He has worked on a server side Ruby implementation of the CardSpace stack called Information Card Ruby. This is a cool project. It shows you that the CardSpace stack is built on open and implement-able standards. We had a good discussion on the topic. Columbus Ruby Brigade After the conference was over, the Columbus Ruby Brigade had their monthly meeting. It was cool - we hosted at the Microsoft office in Columbus. Joe O'Brien broke out an idea that he had been keeping in his pocket for a while. The talk was a fishbowl. He set up a table in the middle of the room which had 6 chairs. He picked 5 people be in the fishbowl. At any point, someone else could come sit in the 6th chair but someone else had to get up. As I'm writing this out - I'm figuring out that I need to write a separate post just on the Fishbowl Discussion Format - so I stopped this post and did that here. The discussion was fun and engaging. This interesting thing that I pointed out at the end but a lot of people had noticed was that the discussion was really centered around agile, TDD, mocking and much more. There were some really passionate debates around whether mocking was evil or not. It has been really interesting, as the Microsoft guy, to see the reactions of various people around the room as they realized that Microsoft was one of the sponsors and in attendance at eRubyCon. Wait until they figure out that I'm speaking and that I was accepted to speak before offering to sponsor. Joe O'Brien, the host and organizer of the conference, has been very gracious. So far - it's a fantastic conference and I'm thrilled to be involved. eRubyCon - Columbus, Ohio
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