Monday, February 02, 2009

MWRC Speaker Interview (from twitter)

Twitter presents opportunities for trying things differently. With the MountainWest RubyConf coming up, I wanted to interview some of the speakers — this proved to be my chance to try things differently. I like the way it turned out.

I started out interviewing David Brady (@dbrady), but Kirk Haines (@wyhaines) joined the party. Then Jim Wierich (@jimweirich) jumped in on at the end too.

It was kind of like doing an interview in the hall at RubyConf and having other hackers join in the fun. While I'm sure it wasn't for everyone, I liked the way it turned out and will probably do some more interviews this way in the future. Let me know what you think.


Pat Eyler @dbrady you came to MWRC last year, this year you're speaking there. Why do you think MWRC is worthwhile? [tweet]

David Brady I was completely blown away by MWRC last year. I learned twice as much as I did at RailsConf, for a tenth the cost. Also, people look at single-track conferences like it's a compromise. It's not. 1 track means 1 back channel, 1 coherent group. MWRC had more IQ per dollar than a yugo full of rocket scientists hauling a sled full of border collies. [tweet tweet tweet]

Kirk Haines I'll give you my answer to that. Last 2 years it has been well managed & interesting. I expect the 3rd year to be the same. [tweet]

Pat Eyler @dbrady The notes for your #mwrc presentation say "TourBus", that's it. What are you talking about and why is it important? [tweet]

David Brady TourBus is a web load-testing tool that balances scalability and complexity. It's important because your app doesn't scale. [tweet]

Pat Eyler @wyhains you're #mwrc presentation description isn't much better, "Vertebra" — what are you going to be covering in your talk? [tweet]

Kirk Haines Hmm. I sent a much more detailed description. So, my talk: An overview of Vertebra, and then drilling down into some of the the interesting Ruby problems & the solutions to them. [tweet tweet]

Pat Eyler @wyhains can you give an example of an interesting problem? [tweet]

Kirk Haines Building a communications core to handle fault tolerant XMPP communications in a transport-flexible way, without going insane from trying to manage a sea of threads, mutexes, special cases, etc. The solution involves an evented core w/ all segments of work encapsulated in slick little deferrable objects. It's pretty cool. [tweet tweet tweet]

Pat Eyler @dbrady Besides your own talk, what are you most looking forward to this year at #mwrc? [tweet]

David Brady Honestly the thing I look forward to most is the hackfest. Another reason to love 1-tracks: you all conf, then you all go hack. As for the content, I'm excited by the "focused passion" of the talks: Wii's, Craftsmanship, Rhodes, Cucumber, etc. Lastly, I'm a bit of a hero worshipper. I'd pay to hear James Edward Gray, Jim Weirich or Jeremy McAnally talk about oatmeal. [tweet tweet tweet]

Jim Weirich @dbrady Revamping talk to make sure it includes copious references to oatmeal. [tweet]

Pat Eyler @dbrady What are you going to be hacking on at the hackfest? Do you have a project in mind, or will you find something there? [tweet]

David Brady Not a clue. One of my Resolutions is to ship code every single day. Currently I'm into nanoapps, so six weeks is a LONG way away. [tweet]

Pat Eyler @wyhains what are you looking forward to at #mwrc 2009? [tweet]

Kirk Haines The same as @dbrady, more or less. Hackfest and interacting with great people + opportunity to learn some cool new stuff. [tweet]

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1 comment:

Mike said...

That's awesome. This will be my first MWRC. I'm stoked! With all the hype I hope my expectations are too high. ;)