Mike Vincent

Really glad I was able to attend the Lone Star Ruby Conference. It’s always great to get to meet people I’ve either never met or only in some online fashion. To highlight some of the things I most enjoyed about this particular conference…

• Only 200 attendees, so it retained that small community feel.
• I kind of enjoyed the single track style for a change. Sure there might have been less mingling than if we were constantly shuffling from track to track, but I served to help get to know the people you were around much better as well. I’m also pretty certain that I would have missed at least a couple of what turned out to be my favorite talks if I had been given choices.
• The food was pretty good, pats on the back to those responsible!
• While I didn’t win anything, the give-a-ways were quite nice.
• plenty of power outlets, bandwidth was lacking but I’ve yet to see that any different at any conference. DeVue video from Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, the guys from Rails Envy. Django vs Rails. To be released Monday, it’s a must see; very funny.

My personally favorite talks were…

• James Edward Gray II talked about using ruby as glue, which I’ve done my share of. Lots of good tips and a reminder that the best solution to a problem is probably simpler than you think if you look to using the existing tools around you.
• David Chelimsky’s talk on rspec/bdd with live demonstration. I <3 the live demo, anyone that does something like that well tends to make their talk magnitudes more interesting, even more so with audience participation. Great job, David.
• However you may feel about the subject matter, HD Moore’s talk about metasploit was pretty interesting. I’ll leave it at that. :)
• PJ Hyett’s talk was refreshing for the first talk of saturday morning and it was soem practical advice for making your site successful.
• Patrick Farley gave what I think was ultimately the most rewarding talk for me. He actually went in depth showing and discussing ruby’s internals to illustrate how ruby handles classes, modules, methods, etc. I found it very interesting and now I’m going to have to spend some time looking at the internals too. :) As well as projects like Jruby and rubinius.
• Must give props to fellow DFW homie and glue of dallas.rb, Adam Keys I’ve long come to the same conclusion about the need for at least 3 people on a team.
• Chris Wanstrath’s talk was also pretty awesome. He kept a good focus on BDD being about testing (specing, I use them interchangeably, too ;) behavior and not implementation. I thought he did a pretty good job describing what the difference is and why you focus on behavior.
• Charles Nutter of Jruby fame was interesting too. (bonus points for live demos)
• Zed.. The final (anti)keynote from Zed Shaw, simulcasted on IRC, was very good and entertaining. I plan to read up more on statistics and R sometime soon.

There seemed to be a (sometimes not so) subtle recurring theme in the talks too.

• Don’t be an asshole, and we are probably all assholes at some time.
• We’re all capable people, exercise your capabilities
• Don’t be sheep

Definitely see myself going to this again next year.

Just got back from the first of what I'm sure to be many more DemoCamp sessions in Dallas. It was pretty cool, I did a rough head count and believe there were somewhere between 35 and 40 people. All the demos were nice and inspiring. It's a neat format, too. Lots of people making and doing stuff getting together and giving a really quick (10min demo 5min q&a) rundown on what it is they're up to. It was all software this time, but there's no constraints on what it is. If it's something you've made and you can demo it within 10-15mins, bring it. I should stop starting things and get something finished. ;)

I finally made the time to catch a dallas.rb meeting last night. Great people. I'm pretty certain I'll be coming more frequently from now on. Last night's meeting was pretty much an ad hoc series of discussions for a couple of hours ranging from the Comatose micro CMS plugin for rails to The ErLang Movie. Looking forward to next year's meet.