I spent yesterday in Berlin at RailsWayCon. It ended up being pretty small, but a very good conference both in content and attendants. I was impressed by the level of the people there, and I also liked the presentations I saw. Full disclosure, though – I was part of the program committee, so maybe it wasn’t that weird I enjoyed the content. =)
As it happens, I did three talks myself, so I didn’t see as many other talks as I would have wanted. Specifically, I missed Bristol’s talk about JRuby, and Stefan Tilkov’s talk about REST in Rails. Would have liked to see both of them, actually.
My first talk was the first of the day, about the JRuby internals. I was pretty happy with how that turned out, and I think the audience appreciated it too. There was way too much content for one hour, though, so I had to skip over some parts, such as how to build extensions and so on. If you’re interested in the slides, you can find them here: http://olabini.com/presentations/JRubyInternals.pdf.
After that I sat in on Naude talking about event driven programming from different perspectives. It gave a good introduction and overview to the subject.
Then it was time for me again, this time doing a talk about Ioke. I’m pretty with how that turned out too. Got a pretty good audience and nice questions. The slides are here: http://olabini.com/presentations/IokeForRubyDevelopers.pdf.
And finally, after lunch, I did my keynote about programming languages. That was great fun, really. It was basically a talk that summarized my views about programming languages and where I see them going – with a specific focus on Ruby. I had a great time, and hopefully the audience did too. The slides probably doesn’t make much sense without me talking – in fact, I’m not sure they make sense with me talking either – but you can see them here: http://olabini.com/presentations/ProgrammingLanguages-RailsWayCon-Keynote.pdf.
I saw Koz do a talk about good taste in how far you take ideas. It was a good talk about common sense – one of those things that are way to seldom heard.
And finally Bristol talked about good UI design – this was also a very interesting talk. I enjoyed it.
And then I flew out of Berlin.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Really enjoyed all your talks. I especially liked the JRuby internals talk which was something completely new to me, but very much understandable though.
I knew all the stuff in your Ioke talk, but it was fun hearing you talk about it nevertheless. Talked to a couple of people afterwards and they all were very much impressed about the language and the presentation in general. Thought you’d like to know that.
The keynote was really cool as well. I didn’t really expect it to turn out the way it did, but it was a great piece of history, trivia and personal thoughts. Judging from the reactions of the people in the “smoking area”, they share my opinion.
Btw, meant to say hello and ask you *lots” of questions about your talks and Ioke, but I thought I’d wait till after your keynote. Unfortunately I couldn’t find you anywhere during the breaks after that … too bad =)
Cheers, Martin
May 28th, 2009
Thank Ola,
I really enjoyed your keynote as well!
May 28th, 2009
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