Hoedown Roundup
Ezra’s Merb presentation was useful for someone like me with no exposure to the framework, but could have been sexier. Where’s our 10 minute blog app?
Adhearsion looks like it might make VOIP accessible to me, which is a pretty ridiculous notion. If you’re thinking VOIP and Ruby, think Adhearsion. I know the speaker is probably frustrated that his demo didn’t come off at the end, but that was going to be incredible if he pulled it off.
I’ve heard Bruce Tate speak a number of times, but it’s clear to me that getting out of the Java sphere has actually been good for his psyche. He speaks with a lot more passion now and asks interesting questions. He’s not the only one asking them, but I think it’s pretty likely that some of my fellow attendees could really get something out of reflecting on his talk.
Our social schedule led to missing the games development talk. Ooops!
The lightning round was relatively informative, and I preferred it to what I saw during the security talk at RailsConf.
The birds of a feather session that I attended about using Rails for social good included discussion of a mailing list that I hope ends up happening.
The presenters on the second day after that all did a great job. Ken Ault gave a great talk about the Rails ecosystem and how the interrelations were important for Smalltalk and what Ruby can learn. Smalltalk got a lot of “face-time” this weekend.
Jared Richardson gave a really illuminating talk on the interrelationship between C and Ruby.
Both talks I’m going to watch again at some point, and I think that’s one of the highest compliments I can pay.
Marcel Molina wrapped up with a talk on beauty which really wasn’t to my tastes, although clearly many people in the crowd responded well to it.
Overall, I think the organizers and the presenters did an incredible job of getting a lineup of interesting speakers and topics together in a place, delivering a great value, and bringing it off almost without a hitch. Awesome job, and I give my compliments to everyone involved.