MWRC Interview Collection

I've done a bunch of interviews ABOUT MWRC. Some of these have been quite popular, while others are sort of hidden gems. If you've enjoyed one of them, maybe you'd like to see some of the others. I'll start out with three of my favorites, but there's a complete list down below.

1) My interview with Philippe Hanrigou has become one of the most popular posts on my blog. He has developed a reputation as one of the great MWRC speakers, and I think his interview is a good indicator of why. You might also want to see his talks on What to do when Mongrel stops responding (from 2008) and What The Ruby Craftsman Can Learn From The Smalltalk Master (from 2009).

2) I started an interview with David Brady on twitter. Before it was over, Kirk Haines and Jim Weirich had joined in. Not only did this interview spawn a great meme, the story got better when David came into the second day of conference from his sickbed and gave his talk during lunch (we'd already run the replacement talk). Now that's dedication. You should go watch David's presentation on TourBus, Kirk's, on vertebra, or Jim's keynote.

3) I like this last one because it provides a different take on things. I interviewed Josh Susser about his interest in attending MWRC. Maybe most telling about his interest was that he went off and organized GoGaRuCo (hmmm, isn't there something about imitation and flattery — just kidding, Josh and GoGaRuCo are great!).

MWRC 2009

• interview with Jeremy Mcanally
• interview with l David Brady and Kirk Haines (with a special guest appearance by Jim Weirich)
• interview with Andrew Shafer
• interview with Jim Weirich
• interview with Philippe Hanrigou
• interview with Ben Mabey

MWRC 2008

• interview with Patrick Farley
• interview with Josh Susser
• interview with Jeremy Mcanally
• interview with Christian Sepulveda of Pivotal Labs

MWRC 2009 Mini-Interview: Jim Weirich

In my latest MWRC mini-interview, I talked with Jim Weirich @jimweirich) who is a second time presenter. MountainWest RubyConf is well known for the quality of presenters and attendees, you owe it to yourself to be a part of it this year. At $100 for two days, it's a great value — what are you waiting for, go register

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There's no description of your talk 'The Building Blocks of Modularity' on the website. Other than oatmeal, what can we expect from it?

Jim I've been thinking about principles of software design lately. You know, the "rules" one programs by. We all have them, whether it is something simple like the "DRY Principle", or the "Keep Methods Short" rules, or more elaborate rules like the set of SOLID principles from Bob Martin.

So, what makes a good set of principles? It seems to me that quite a number of these principles deal with the issues of program complexity and keeping software maintainable and under control while continually changing it. Is there something in the fundamental nature of software that causes us to gravitate toward these common principles?

Meilir Page-Jones likes to talk about software in terms of connascence. Connascence is simply the idea that different parts of a software program must changes together in order for the entire program to work correctly. For example, to change the name of a function, I need to change the name everywhere the function is used. Every location that references the name of that function is related to all the other locations through "Connascense of Name". By understanding the different kinds of connascence, we can begin to understand the principles we use to build more modular and maintainable programs.

Your 'Shaving with Occam' was a favorite at MWRC 2008. Which talks from last year stood out to you?

Jim The talk that stands out for me was the Shoulda talk by Tammer Saleh (@tsaleh). That was the first time I had heard of Shoulda and since then I've become a big fan of that library.

What are you most looking forward to at MWRC 2009?

Jim I have to choose? Playstation and Wii talks! Testing talks on Cucumber and GUIs! I think more than the talks I'm looking forward to just meeting great people and talking about Ruby.

What do you think 2009 holds in store for Ruby, the language and the community?

Jim It's always hard to predict the future. With Ruby 1.9.1 out now, I'm hoping that more and more gems and libraries will be upgraded to use it. There are some really exciting features in 1.9 and getting the community on board with 1.9 will be a critical step in bringing Ruby into the future.

If you could attend a Regional Foo Conf for some other language, what language would it be?

Jim I would love to attend a conference on Clojure. I've been following the language a while, but haven't really had the time to actually program in it. With massive multi-core system becoming common place, concurrency is only going to become more and more important. Languages like Erlang and Clojure that attempt to address the concurrency problem head on are going to be big players in that arena.

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MWRC speaker interview: Ben Mabey

Our next MWRC mini-interview is with Ben Mabey (@bmabey or on github). Ben is well known in the Ruby testing community. He's made a number of presentations at URUG meetings, and is going to be doing a presentation on "Outside-In Development with Cucumber" at this years MountainWest RubyConf. Come see Ben and the rest of our presenter, but register soon so we don't fill up with out you.

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What experiences have sold you on testing in general?

Ben When I started doing Rails in 2005 I tried my best to TDD my models and write Rails functional tests. Having tests greatly lowered my stress level when I was deploying applications. Unfortunately my earlier test suites fell into disrepair as I became the victim of many common TDD pitfalls. It wasn’t until I was more experienced and had read a lot about the subject that it started to dawn on me that TDD was really about design. Once I realized this, there were big benefits. On my most recent project we had a really cool experience when we were asked to add new functionality to the system. What seemed like a difficult and time consuming task turned out to be quite easy and we accomplished it by writing a 50-line class that delegated to other (already existing) objects. Testing our objects in isolation and refactoring constantly yielded a very flexible and reusable design. It was neat to see how our design emerged out of the red-green-refactor cycle.

What experiences have sold you on BDD?

Ben My best experiences with BDD started when I began working outside-in with the RSpec Story Runner back in October of 2007. (Cucumber is a rewrite of that project which smoothed out the rough edges and has added some really sweet extensions to the grammar.) Recently, I sat down with a stakeholder and reviewed some concrete examples in table form using Cucumber’s Scenario Outline feature. Through the conversation we were able to clear up some misconceptions I had of how the app was expected to work. As a result, it saved me a good deal of time since the actual requirements were far less complex than my original interpretation. I then used these executable examples to drive my entire development process. I have found that BDD not only helps in writing well designed code but helps in preventing unneeded code from ever being written! My presentation will focus on the outside-in approach and how Cucumber fits into this process.

How much emphasis do you place on code coverage?

Ben I use code coverage stats as an indicator, not a dictator. Meaning, if I come into a project and find low code coverage I lose confidence in the system and in the ability the tests give me to refactor quickly. However, if an app has high coverage (even 100%) I don’t assume every part of the project is well tested. I have run across situations where RCov gives you 100% line coverage but by simply looking at the code and tests it is obvious that large paths of functionality are not being tested. I highly recommend Jason Rudolph’s series on how to fail with 100% test coverage.

What about other measures of code quality?

Ben I am a big fan of Jake Scruggs’ Metric-fu library. I like to set it up on all my projects and have it run on a CI server (I generally use CC.rb). The Metric-fu plugin is a collection of useful tools to analyze ruby code. My favorite tools included are flog (an ABC metric based tool) and Saikuro (cyclomatic complexity). I like them because they point out long or complex methods that are prime candidates for refactoring. While not a code metric tool per se, I also really like kablame which will use your SCM’s blame command to identify who is writing the tests and shame those who are not. Outside of these metric tools I also think tests are a great indication of code quality and design; if code is hard to test then the design is probably lacking.

Other than your own, what MWRC presentation are you most looking forward to?

Ben I am really amazed by the presentations MWRC has lined up this year. The past two years have been great and this year looks to be just as good, if not better. As a TDD/BDD junkie I am really excited to see Brian Marick present. I have heard great things about his presentations and I’m hoping to learn a lot. I also keep wondering what tricks James Britt has in store and can’t wait to try some of them on my own Nintendo Wii. I am of course also very excited to see Jim Weirich speak again- I always walk out of his presentations feeling like a better programmer.

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MWRC speaker interview: Andrew Shafer

It's Monday morning, so it must be time for another MWRC mini-interview. Andrew Shafer (@littleidea) was good enough to answer several questions for me.

This interview has a lot of meat to it, so enjoy. Then, go register for MWRC!

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You're a programmer working on a very sys-admin-y tool. What could sys admins learn from developers?

Andrew This is a fascinating question on several levels. I like to talk about Developers and Sysadmins tribes, but the truth is, there are a lot of subcultures. For example, Ruby developers are not Java developers or kernel developers. The fact is there are a lot of smart people out there with tribal optimizations who could all learn a lot from each other. I know less about the different sysadmin tribes, and I hate to over generalize, but from my observations the sysadmins can benefit a lot from learning to think more symbolically, especially the way things are going with infrastructure. There is a tendency to get stuck in the procedural details and to avoid abstraction. The other big thing is version control. And forget about CVS, RCS or anything else, go straight to git. Do it now. Seriously. What are you waiting for?

What can programmers learn from sys admins?

Andrew I don't want to over generalize here either but it's probably almost the opposite lesson. Ruby programmers tend to work with fairly high levels of abstraction. Sometimes there is a lot of value in the details. If you are only manipulating symbolic abstractions, you often don't know how things really work. Sysadmins tend to know a lot more about the operating systems, hardware and networking. If you want to build modern web applications at scale, the developers have to consider that stuff. This is less technical but sysadmins probably think more holistically about how they fit in to an organization, since their customers are often internal and they wear pagers. Admins probably have less tendency to blow people off with a 'works at my desk' shrug. (or then again, they might be BOFH disciples who will make sure it doesn't work at yours...)

Either way, there's a lot of things for these tribes to learn from each other. This might not be so clear when one server can handle the whole stack. I'm a big fan of pairing, but there are definitely big benefits to having devs pair with admins on projects or issues that blur the application/infrastructure boundaries.

Why should an average Rubyist be interested in Puppet?

Andrew There is the obvious answer of being able to automate provisioning things like Rails consistently. For anyone who might not know, Puppet is a framework which allows you to describe how a system should be configured and then makes sure it stays that way. Puppet has it's own language, which generates Ruby objects, which get transported to hosts and then does the work of comparing the system to the desired state and changing whatever isn't in the proper state.

But Puppet has a lot of interesting pieces of code. The most interesting is probably either the parser or the resource abstraction layer, both places are where some magic happens. Puppet was first released in 2005 and people have learned a lot about DSLs and adopted Ruby idioms along the way. Some Puppet code is an unfamiliar dialect to most Rubyists, but the exercise of understanding how Puppet works will teach most people a few new things about Ruby.

Besides your own talk, what are you most looking forward to this year?

Andrew That's tough, do I have to pick just one thing? Last year, Jim Weirich's keynote blew my mind and I'd go out of my way to hear him talk about almost anything, but Brian Marick is another one of my favorite speakers who always has a few new twists and wrinkles for my cortex to process. If we can have a MWRC awesome speaker celebrity death match between those two, I'll look forward to that the most. Last year, the most practical talk for me was Philippe Hanigou's jedi knight dtrace talk, so I'm looking forward to getting his insights from Smalltalk. Jay Phillip's Adhearsion talk might be a show stopper too. Ben Mabey and David Brady, I have met at the Utah Ruby User Group, so I want to see them represent. Can I just go through the whole speaker list and say why I'm excited about that talk? I always look forward to hanging with the Ruby tribe.

Why should people come to MWRC?

Andrew MWRC 2008 was my first Ruby conference and I was blown away. If this year is half as good, it is worth 10X the price of admission. Watching Jay Phillips and Yehuda Katz debate about testing in the hallway for 10 minutes was worth the $100. At the time, I was coming up the Ruby onramp from years of Java and C/C++. I came in with enthusiasm but no expectations, and I left thinking I finally found my people. I was struck by the raw passion and the touch of irreverence. There wasn't just a bunch of people talking about a technology, it was a group who was literally bending technology to their will and daring you to join them if you could. You shouldn't come to MWRC because you want to learn about Ruby, Google and Amazon can solve that, come to MWRC because you want to be inspired.

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MWRC speaker interview: Jeremy McAnally

Here's the second MWRC speaker interview (you can read the other one, with David Brady and Kirk Haines here). This time, I'm talking with Jeremy McAnally (@jm), who's presenting "Jive Talkin’: DSL Design and Construction"

If you want to learn more about DSLs, or about Ruby in general, make sure you're at the MountainWest RubyConf on March 13th and 14th. Register for your spot now!

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What makes DSLs so interesting to Rubyists?

Jeremy There are two technical reasons I think. First, because we write such readable code in the first place because of Ruby's lack of line noise in its syntax, we like to do that whenever possible. So when we start thinking about syntax for what we're going to be building, we figure why *not* build an internal DSL if it's minimal work on top of what we're going to be doing on the front end and will save us some time on the back end.

Secondly, Ruby is really, really dynamic and so we're able to bend and build objects as we see fit. These features make it super easy to "customize" (for lack of a better term) the syntax of our system.

On a more social level, I think Ruby appeals to people who like clean code, therefore the cleaner the code (i.e., the less extra language-y crap around what really matters) the better. That's essentially what a DSL really is: stripping your "lexicon" down to its purest, most specific form for what you're working on. Ruby lets you do that a lot more than other languages, as I've learned through my C# experience and in my recent Objective-C adventures. Every time I go back and tinker with these languages, I always come back more thankful for Ruby's features and syntax.

How can a Ruby Nuby get a toehold into DSL building?

Jeremy Well, this is sort of the whole topic of my talk in a sense, but in a nutshell: experiment. Play with new language features, try to bend Ruby to fit new ideas, do something crazy with lambdas. Once you have a feel for Ruby's really flexible features, then build your lexicon and start implementing it. Don't be afraid to iterate; none of my DSLs have ever just popped out in their perfect form. The rg DSL took 2-3 passes to even get it into something I would use, much less something I was satisfied with.

This will be your second year at MWRC, what was your favorite part of last years conference?

Jeremy I feel like MWRC is one of the few real community conferences out there. A lot of regional conferences these days are getting more and more commercial and about the "experience", and less and less about what actually matters: socialization, awesome talks, and hacking. Hopefully MWRC along with the other solid community events can continue to be shining examples of what a conference should look like.

Besides your own talk, what are you most looking forward to this year?

Jeremy I'm hoping James Britt's talk can convince my wife to buy me a Wii, but, uh, more realistically, I'm interested in the talk on Rhodes. I've been trying to get into iPhone development, but it'd be awesome build my app once (in Ruby no less!) and deploy on iPhone, Palm, etc. Of course, everyone always likes to hear what Jim Weirich has to say, and I'm really excited about the Adhearsion talk and its little sandboxed surprise. :)

Why should people come to MWRC?

Jeremy Uh, to see me speak, of course. Also, you guys concentrate a lot on the social aspect which makes for a great experience, you aren't in it to make money so I don't feel like I'm being accosted by vendors all the time, and there are always awesome talks. I'm still watching videos from two years ago.

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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.

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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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ruby > ( code == data )

In his Code Generation: The Safety Scissors Of Metaprogramming talk, Giles Bowkett talks about the power of Lisp and how Ruby approaches it. One of the Giles’ comparisons is that in Lisp (eq code data) which he translates into ruby as code == data. At the time, I just sort of went with the flow, but then I had a discussion with Mike Moore about SICP and I realized there’s a bit more to it than just that.

Mike pointed out a number of juicy quotes in the preface:

“Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that “computer science” is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers.”

”... The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.”

”... we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

”... we believe that the essential material to be addressed by a subject at this level is not the syntax of particular programming-language constructs, nor clever algorithms for computing particular functions efficiently, nor even the mathematical analysis of algorithms and the foundations of computing, but rather the techniques used to control the intellectual complexity of large software systems.”

so we should focus on “the techniques used to control the intellectual complexity of large software systems.”

The more I read these, the more I thought that these quotes read a lot like a Ruby Manifesto. I don’t want to take anything away from Lisp (and Scheme), it’s an incredibly powerful family of languages, and it lets Lisp hackers do amazing things. The thing is though, I don’t think this (think_about people things) is an accurate representation of how people.think.

One of the things that I’ve always loved about Ruby is that it combines a very powerful language with a very expressive language—it allows me to write code that maps very well to the way I think, and the way other programmers I know seem to think.

Is Ruby code beautiful, even poetic as some people claim? Sure, sometimes—but that’s not the point. Ruby makes it easy for me to express ideas in code, and to understand the ideas expressed in other people’s code. It helps me “control the intellectual complexity” of problems, it supports the revolution “in the way we express what we think.” So maybe that’s what it all boils down to.

Viva la Revolution! Viva la Ruby!

More MWRC Videos posted

A bunch more videos are posted at the Confreaks MWRC 2008 page. I’ve seen a number of people saying good things about them.

I think Jim Wierich’s Shaving with Occam was a pretty amazing talk. I’ve already past it around work, and am hearing good things from even the non-rubyists. I think it says a lot about the Ruby community that Jim was able to pull off a keynote that didn’t have any Ruby in it—Lisp, Forth, and Erlang all got some time on screen though.

I don’t think you’d go wrong with any of the talks though. Go spend some time in the archive. Once you finish the 2008 MWRC videos, you might turn your eye to some of the other archives as well.

MWRC 2008 Roundup

This year’s MountainWest RubyConf was incredible. There were a bunch of great talks, and the hallway track (though too short) was awesome. It was especially great to go hang out at the hacking suite put on by Engine Yard

I’m not going to go into too much detail about any of the talks until the video is released on Confreaks MWRC 2008 page. So far only Evan’s Keynote and Ezra’s have made it up (Gile’s talk was up briefly, but seems to have been pulled due to some audio problems).

Evan’s talk was a great peek behind the curtain at Rubinius development. Of course, since the process is so dynamic, it was kind of like peeking behind one of those clear shower curtains. Nonetheless, having Evan there as a guide pointing out the interesting bits and the philosophy made it quite interesting. It was a great kickoff to the rest of the conference.

Ezra’s talk focused on Merb and was more of a nitty-gritty kind of talk than Evan’s was. One bombshell that dropped was that there’s a Merb book in the works from Manning—I wonder if my predictions of a Ruby web framework to challenge Rails are finally going to come true. It was also interesting to hear Ezra talk about the different use cases for mongrel vs. thin or evented-mongrel.

Finally, there were a couple of neat things that won’t make the videos. We were able to raise over a thousand dollars for the Ruby Mendicant project. We didn’t raise enough money to get Steve Baker to Scotland, but it was pretty cool to have some of our speakers come up and say that they wanted to donate their honorarium to him. We even made a great donation on the local front, giving our leftover boxed lunches on Saturday (about 60 of them) to a local food pantry.

We had some great sponsors who made the conference possible. Addison-Wesley , Apress, and O’Reilly all donated books for us to give away in our binary lottery. Because of our sponsors, speakers, and attendees we ended up with a great conference. Thanks everyone!

One Last MWRC Announcement

It looks like I get to make one more announcement about this year’s MountainWest RubyConf. After writing about Gregory Brown’s Ruby mendicant idea, we started talking about what we could do to help it out. I think we came up with a great plan.

During the Conference (March 28th and 29th), we’ll take up an extra collection for Gregory, and MountainWest Ruby, LLC will match the first $500 in contributions. I don’t think it gets much better than that. If you’re coming to the conference, bring your checkbook. Oh, and if you’re not coming, you can still donate.

Announcements

Sorry I’ve not updated things in a bit, I’m hanging around the fringes of the flu and trying to play nurse for my family while they all suffer through it. In the meantime, I’ve let a lot of little things pile up and need to get them off my chest.

First, I’m really excited by Gregory Brown’s new status as a Ruby Mendicant. Even better is that Ruby Central is going to match donations up to $5,000. Gregory will do a great job working for the Ruby Community. (Look for an article over on Linux Journal sometime soon with more details.)

Second, I’m very happy to announce that Ruby Central has been selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code again in 2008. I’ll be acting as the coordinator again this year. We should have an idea page up by the end of the week, so if you’ve got ideas to share, or are interested in being a mentor or student, feel free to contact me. (If we’ve already traded email about this, look for an update from me in the next day or two.)

Third, MWRC 2008 is just around the corner. It’s bigger and better than last year, and I can’t wait. Registration has been held open until Wed. March 18th. If you’re not already signed up, this is the time.

Fourth, I’m really happy to announce that Engine Yard will be the first commercial sponsor of On Ruby. I’m a big fan of EY, and I love the things they’re doing in the community. They’re not going to have any editorial control of the blog, so don’t expect any changes unless it’s a bit more frequency in posting.

Fifth, I’ve been approached by a publisher to be a reviewer for a new book on Erlang. They’ve agreed to let me blog about the process and invite community feedback. I think this is a really cool opportunity, and I can’t wait to get things rolling. (Look for most of my posts about this to happen over at On Erlang though.)

Finally, I’m doing some reading and will be doing some reviews in the near future. The four books getting the most of my attention are:

• Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios
• Practice of System and Network Administration
• Ruby Programming for Medicine and Biology
• The Ruby Programming Language

The big question becomes which to do first. To help answer that, I’ve started a poll over in the column on the right. Let me know what you’d like to see.

EY HackFest at MWRC!

Some time ago, I told you that one of the sponsors was planning to do something pretty cool, and I think you’ll agree that they’ve done it in spades:

Engine Yard will be hosting a 24/7 Hackfest at MWRC 08’ – we’ve got a killer suite at the Hilton, expert developers of all varieties, and an open door policy. Hacking, Talking, TV watching, whatever – there’ll be good company, food and drinks, and a great space to hang. More details to follow closer to the conference – see you there…

the Engine Yard blog.

There are a lot of other great reasons to come too. But, there’s just over one week left to register.

Registration is going pretty well. We’ve registered folks from as far away as Norway and New Zealand, not to mention people from all over the USA. There are still seats left though, so if you’d like to come out and spend some time with a lot of great Rubyists don’t was any time … come on over and get your seats.

Pivotal Labs on the MountainWest RubyConf

Christian Sepulveda, of Pivotal Labs, was kind enough to talk to me a bit about the 2008 MountainWest RubyConf and why they’ve stepped up as a sponsor. I really like his description of regional Ruby conferences as “a group conversation”, I think that’s just what we’re all shooting for.

By the way, if you’re looking to work with Ruby and/or Rails at a cool company like Pivotal Labs (see the Christian’s first answer below), you should register for MWRC and be a part of the conversation.

Why would a company like yours sponsor a regional Ruby conference like MWRC?

We have lots of Rails developers and have made a significant strategic investment in Ruby and Rails. Increasing our brand awareness in this market, both for prospective clients and recruiting talent, is important for us.

What’s the difference between a regional conference and RubyConf or RailsConf for a sponsor’s perspective?

The larger conferences have more reach, but they are also getting a little saturated. The difference for us is like the difference between talking via a megaphone vs. a group conversation.

What do you think attendees will get out of a conference like MWRC?

Idea exchange, networking, knowledge of what’s going on in the larger community.

If you could sit down with a Rubyist from the MountainWest, why/how would you encourage her to go to MWRC?

Ruby is getting really close to going main-stream (some would argue that has started). Now’s the time to get involved and be in front of the wave rather than behind it.

What message about Pivotal Labs do you hope attendees will take home?

Pivotal has some of the best technical chops around. We are committed to Ruby/Rails and its wide adoption.

MountainWest RubyConf 2008 Registration Open

MountainWest Ruby, LLC has just opened registration for this year’s MountainWest RubyConf, which will be March 28th and 29th in Salt Lake City, Utah. According to the website:

MountainWest RubyConf is a two day conference costing just $100 which includes lunch both days, t-shirts, and a terrific opportunity to rub elbows with some of the smartest Rubyists around. We have a great list of presenters with compelling presentations.

The list of presenters does look great:

• Giles Bowkett – Code Generation: The Safety Scissors Of Metaprogramming
• Devlin Daley – Enough Statistics so that Zed won’t yell at you
• Patrick Farley – Ruby Internals
• Philippe Hanrigou – What To Do when Mongrel Stops Responding to Your Requests and Ruby Doesn’t Want to Tell You About It
• Yehuda Katz – Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper
• Jan Lehnardt – Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB
• Jeremy McAnally – Deep Ruby
• Joe O’Brien – Domain Specific Languages: Molding Ruby
• Tammer Saleh – BDD with Shoulda
• Jonathan Younger – Using Amazon’s Web Services from Ruby

While the keynotes aren’t announced yet, I think they’re going to be awesome too. I’m looking forward to the announcements. So, what are you waiting for? Go register—it’s only $100 for what looks like an awesome conference.

2008 MountainWest RubyConf: CFP Revisited

With the end of RubyConf, I’ve seen a couple more talk proposals for the 2008 MountainWest RubyConf. I also got an email from a RubyConf presenter. With his permission, I wanted to share it with you since it’s a question that may be on your mind too.

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Hey Pat!

I was wondering how much attendance overlap you (as in MountainWest) have with the general RubyConf? I was thinking about submitting a proposal for the talk I gave at RubyConf, but if the audience is going to have seen it already, it’s probably not worth it.

Probably <10% of the MWRC attendees are also RubyConf attendees.

What do you think? Are you interested in recycled RubyConf proposals?

Sure! Recycled or rejected proposals would be welcomed. (Of course a recycled talk is less likely to be selected compared to a new proposal of equal quality.) In fact, if you’d like to propose something that you already proposed to another conference besides RubyConf, feel free (with the same caveats).

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I’ve also been asked what kinds of talks we’d most like to see. Our biggest selection criterea is going to be “How interesting is this talk going to be for a bunch of Ruby/Ruby on Rails hackers?” If you’re thinking of proposing “Why I should write my next web app in Django”, this is probably the wrong venue for you. On the other hand, if you wanted to do a 45 minute overview of why Rubyists should learn to program in Factor/Erlang/Haskell/Prolog/Intercal … well, a talk like that just might work (except for the Intercal variation).

If you don’t think you have 45 minutes worth of material, don’t forget our lightning talks. We’re hoping to open up the floor to eighteen or so 5 minute long lightning talks.

MountainWest RubyConf 2008: Call for Presenters

MountainWest RubyConf 2008 is scheduled for March 28 and 29, 2008. It will be in Salt Lake City, at the same great venue we had last year, and it is again our intent to record and make available all the talks under a Creative Commons, Share-Alike license—you can see last year’s talks here: http://mtnwestrubyconf2007.confreaks.com/

If you’ve been working on a problem or project in Ruby, this is a great opportunity to talk about it. We looking for short (250-500 word) proposals outlining the content and target audience for your talk. Proposals will be accepted until Midnight (MST) on Dec 31st. Our selection committee will then review the proposals, select the primary and alternate presenters, and contact them in January of 2008.

We’re looking for all sorts of Ruby and RoR related talks (and talks that aren’t strictly Ruby related but which would be of interest to rubyists). Talks will be 45 minutes in length, and should allow some time for audience questions. If you’d prefer something shorter, we’re hoping to run a lightning talk sessions on Friday and Saturday, with 8-10 five minute presentations each session—proposals are not required for lightning talks.

Proposals should be submitted to me

Last year, we received a number of high quality proposals for talks at the 2007 MountainWest RubyConf. These talks made our regional conference a huge success. This year, we’re hoping to do even better but we’re going to need your help—please, propose a talk and plan on coming to enjoy this regional conference.

Post Conference Notes From All Over

Just a couple of quick things to get out of my system as I recover from the 2007 MountainWest RubyConf:

• The conference was great! I loved (almost) every minute of it — it took me an hour or two to get past my anxiety about whether or not it was going to come off.
• I'm working with RubyCentral to organize our participation in the Google Summer of Code. If you're interested in submitting a project, check out our page of ideas (don't worry, you're free to run with your own ideas if you'd rather) then go fill out an application.
• I've started working on an Amazon hosted book store — I'll only be putting books there that I really think are worthwhile. I don't make a ton of money from Amazon, but it certainly helps me justify spending time on this blog and my other (unpaid) writing.
• I'm getting back in to the swing of tumble blogging over at my tumble blog. I just flat out didn't have any time over the last week or so.
• I'm also in the middle of tech reviewing two great looking Ruby books. Neither publisher has announced them yet, but as soon as they do I'm ready to tell you just how cool they are.

Okay, it's time to get some real work done. I'll be posting again (and more substantively soon.

Ruby in Google's Summer of Code 2007

Google's Summer of Code is almost upon us. Ruby Central is once again planning to act as the mentoring organization for Ruby.

For Ruby to be represented again this year, we need mentors. If you're interested in helping a college student work on a project using (or benefitting) Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Jruby, rubinius, or any of the other insanely cool Ruby environments please send me an email right away. We need to get our application turned in this week (before March 12).

Google will post the list of mentoring organizations on March 14th. Google will be accepting student proposals March 15-24, so, if you're a student, this is the time to start putting together a proposal.

Check out th Summer of Code FAQ, Advice for Mentors, and/or Advice for Students.

Evangelizing Ruby

Man, it's just my luck. Here I am, happily ensconced in a great job doing something I love (and using Ruby to do it) in a situation that's nearly perfect for my family, and along comes a job announcement fit to make me drool. It's kind of like a mini mid-life crisis. Oh well, since I'm not planning on chasing it, I thought I'd share it out here for all of you folks.

CodeGear, a Borland startup, is looking for Ruby evangelists. They're looking for people with:

1. Intense experience with Ruby Ruby on Rails
2. Strong knowledge of the World Wide Web technologies including XML, SOAP, WSDL, AJAX, etc.
3. Ability to present in front of groups of people
4. Exemplary writing, blogging, and product demonstration skills
5. Good organizational skills
6. Ability to follow through and prioritize

Here's their "Detailed Outline of Responsibilities":

• Developer community evangelist:
  1. Demo product and present at industry events
  2. Present at User Groups and SIGs
  3. Deliver CodeGear's strategic vision/mission
  4. Give technical presentations, write articles, create videos
  5. Bring community feedback to the CodeGear R&D team
  6. Leverage luminaries and leaders to help our products.
• Direct technical content development:
  1. Write articles on subject topics for the developer community web site and other web and magazine sites
  2. Build case studies, success stories, and developer profiles.
• Tool and Component Builders - CodeGear Outreach:
  1. Help 3rd party tools integrate with CodeGear products
  2. Solicit new 3rd party companies to support CodeGear efforts.

If you are interested, contact David Intersimone. Good luck, I'm sure there are a ton of people who'd love to land this job.

MountainWest RubyConf: Implementors Panel

One of the things I'm most interested in at the 2007 MountainWest RubyConf is the Implementor's Panel. We're going to have John Lam (RubyCLR, Microsoft), Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo (JRuby, Sun), Evan Phoenix (rubinius), and Kevin Tew (Cardinal) taking part in the second Implementors' Summit alongside the conference and making a panel presentation during the confence. We're going to make sure there's plenty of time for Q & A during this panel session.

The first implementors' summit was held at RubyConf 2006, and paved the way for a lot of the cooperation that we're seeing between implementors today. Hopefully this summit and panel will help promote further cooperation between the implementors and with the community at large.

If this kind of presentation is interesting to you, you should head over and sign up now, before all the seats are gone. There are only 250 available, and you don't want to get left out in the cold.

If you're working on a Ruby implementation of your own, and you'd like to be involved in the summit/panel, please drop me a line and we'll see what we can do.