RubyConf stuff

17 Nov 2007

Well. RubyConf was two weeks ago now and I still haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. It was a different experience this year than last (understanding that last year was my first RubyConf), and I’m not sure whether I liked it better. I would have preferred a single track, although I completely acknowledge the reasons why multitrack made sense… I just didn’t like having to make decisions between two talks I really wanted to see, which happened at pretty much every junction.

I particularly enjoyed Ryan Davis and Eric Hodel’s talks, which both more or less boiled down to them talking about the tactics they use to write more/better code. That’s the kind of thing I really like to hear about: the ways that other people boost their productivity and output quality. In this case, the people were experts, but it’s fun to hear from newbies too, as they almost always bring new perspective.

Another highlight was Laurent Sansonetti’s talk on how Apple loves Ruby. I can’t really explain how totally awesome this was. Apple really does love Ruby, and the stuff you can do in Leopard with Ruby is astounding. You’ll just have to watch the video.

Speaking of which, one totally awesome thing that may not be universally known is that Confreaks recorded (almost) every session and are publishing the videos on their website. It’s a lot of video to process so things are a little slow in coming, but eventually all of the conference videos will be here. They’ve already published all of the RejectConf presentations…you can see my 3 minutes on IRB history (now with more working) here. The code is available here.

I’ve also arranged to get the raw camera captures for my talk and I’ll be putting together a video of my presentation in a different format later. On that topic, the slides for my presentation are available at this link. They’re under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license… the video on Confreaks will be as well, which is slightly different than what their pages say. The non-commercial clause is the only exception.

Also as promised, below is a list of links to the stuff I talked about:

Serial Hardware

X10 Home Automation

BetaBrite LED Sign

Arduino

XBee Radios

Buy some gear!

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