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 | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: berlin, conferences, presentations, railswaycon. | #

Today I’m sitting in Berlin, at the Berliner Congress Center, at a tutorial about BDD at the RailsWayCon. Berlin is pretty nice this time of year. Just wished I had some time to walk around.

The main problem with that is that tomorrow I’m doing three different talks, basically in a row. The first one is going to be a guide to JRuby internals. It’s a talk about how Ruby works, some tricky points, and then a guide to the source code and what is available in JRuby. The goal is for people to be able to go in and understand JRuby and start hacking on it after the talk.

After that I’m doing an Ioke introduction. This is going to be more or less the same as the usual Ioke presentation I’ve done two or three times now. It’s fun to see how people react to it, though.

Finally, I’m doing a keynote about programming languages. It’s going to be very interesting. I’m going to more or less talk about all those ideas about programming languages that I’ve been ranting about for a long time. Fun fun.

And then I fly to San Francisco.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: berlin, presentations, railswaycon. | #

It is less than a month to RailsWayCon in Berlin, so I thought I’d mention it here. This look like it will be a very nice conference. The dates are May 25 to May 27, in Berlin, Germany.

I will do two presentations and one keynote there. The presentations will be “JRuby Internals” and “Ioke for Ruby developers”. The keynote is called “Present and future of programming languages” and will feature my typical kind of ranting about programming languages.

Anyway. Hope to see you in Berlin! You can find more information here: http://it-republik.de/conferences/railswaycon.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, ioke | tags: berlin, conference, conferences, ioke, jruby, keynote, presentations, railswaycon. | #