Those of you following this blog or my twitter stream probably know already that I spent last weekend attending RubyConf India in Bangalore. The conference was a huge success and I’m sure it helped inspire a lot of newbies like me.
Day 1
Along with the rest of the team from Foradian, I took a bus to Bangalore the night before the conference and promptly got late and missed the kick off to the conference by Roy Singham.
Ola Bini presented a keynote on the present and future of programming languages. Despite the fact that we had to struggle to keep up with the references to languages we hadn’t heard of, Ola kept the talk very interesting.
Me and Aslam with Obie Fernandez at RubyConf India 2010
Ola’s talk was followed by a session by Obie Fernandez titled “Blood, Sweat and Rails 2010″. Obie was funny and controversial, and even got rebuked for “abusive language”. (Aw, c’mon organizers… you can’t invite someone to speak and then shout at them.) He spoke about agile and Hashrocket and shared a lot of anecdotes about his work in Hashrocket. There were plenty of funny pictures from Hashrocket offices and one or two from the movie 3 Idiots that got the crowd roaring with laughter.
In the afternoon, Matz joined in through video conference and spoke about Ruby. To hear the story of Ruby from the guy who created it was… well… awesome. He spoke about Ruby’s history and also the future of the language. Matz even mentioned that work on Ruby 2 will start in August after version 1.9.2 is completed.
I attended a couple of other talks on the day — Ruby on Rails versus Django – A newbie Web Developer’s Perspective by Shreyank Gupta and Mortal Kombat: Developer vs. Designer by Kapil Mohan and Arun J. Having two tracks meant that I had to sacrifice some very interesting talks in favor of others. Hopefully the videos will be uploaded soon and I’ll be able to catch the other talks.
Day 2
With Nick Sieger at RubyConf India 2010.
The first speaker on the second day was Nick Sieger from Engine Yard who spoke about the features of Rails 3. It was a great talk, and I am feeling more and more guilty about not having tried Rails 3 yet.
Pradeep Elankumaran then spoke about entrepreneurship in India and it was one of the most interactive sessions in RubyConf. He gave quite a few pointers on how to go about building web applications very quickly and about the tools they use at Intridea. I probably scribbled more on the notepad in this session than in all the other sessions combined.
In the afternoon, we attended a talk by Sarah Taraporewalla on the drawback of current view templating systems followed by another talk by Pradeep Elankumaran on Message Queuing in Ruby.
Brian Guthrie’s talk, “Advanced Ruby Idioms So Clean You Can Eat Off Of Them”, although a bit too advanced for newbies like us, was still very interesting. Brian kept the talk very lively with a lot of jokes — many of which the audience sadly missed. The sequence of slides at the end of the presentation with alternate slides in red and green backgrounds with “TEST” written in bold letters made a huge impact on the team on the importance of testing. If only I’d know this method would work so efficiently, I’d have done that long ago. :D
After Brian’s talk, we went to see Arvind’s presentation on Project Fedena which started a little late and therefore we had to run over to the other hall to catch Roy Singham’s closing note.
Ruby v/s Rails
Roy spoke about agile, software development, the ruby community and entrepreneurship. Towards the end of the talk, there was a disagreement between him and Obie Fernandez over the attitudes in the rails community. I have to agree with Obie that you cannot blame the entire Rails community for incidents like that presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby conference. In my opinion, Roy’s ranting against the rails community is only going to leave the community more polarized than before.
Women’s attendance at RubyConf
One thing that shocked me was when Roy Singham mentioned that the attendance of women at this RubyConf — 28 — was the highest ever at any RubyConf. I always knew this wasn’t a particularly women-friendly environment, but I didn’t know things were so bad that a 7% attendance would break all records for Ruby conferences.
Conclusion
Overall, it was a fantastic experience. To get an opportunity to actually speak to guys like Obie Fernandez, Satish Talim and Ola Bini is something I wouldn’t have believed possible a few months ago. I’m still mad at the organizers for interrupting Obie’s talk, but at least we have to be thankful that we got to hear all these people speak.
Did you attend RubyConf? If so, what did you think of the event? What’s your opinion on the whole ruby v/s rails controversy? What about the censoring of respected speakers? What did you like best about the event? Please do leave a comment.