This weekend ThoughtWorks in collaboration with RubyCentral and several sponsors arranged the first ever RubyConf India. I was there as a keynote speaker and wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about the experience, since I think this was an event that showed how much pent up interest there really is for Ruby in India.

When planning the conference we aimed for about 150 delegates – but that sold out in a few days so we rearranged the event to accomodate about 400 people, and we managed to fill that. At the end of the day, there was about 420 people there, including both delegates and speakers.

Unfortunately there had been some problems with visas for Chad Fowler and Ivan Porto Carrero. We solved that by having Ivan present over Skype, and rearrange some of the talks and give Brian Guthrie a last minute spot.

The conference started out with Roy Singham, the founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, setting the tone for the rest of the conference by getting people to think about how India can start innovate for real using technologies such as Ruby.

After that I did a keynote about programming languages, quite similar to what I did at RailsWayCon in Berlin last year. Hopefully people thought it was interesting. I tried to first discuss why we need different languages, where some Ruby language features comes from, a small taxonomy of languages, and some ideas about what might happen in the future.

Obie Fernandez was next up with a controversial keynote called Blood, Sweat and Rails. The basics of the keynote was a description of different lessons Obie has learned from running HashRocket. The controversial bit was based around two different factors, the first being Obie’s heavy use of profanity. (Heavy enough that one of the organizers went up on stage halfway through the presentation and asked him to tone it down). The other controversial part was that Obie used his keynote spot to spend quite a lot of time promoting HashRocket. Later in the day, a representative from ThoughtWorks, and one representative from Castle Rock (another sponsor) went on stage, mentioning that the point of sponsorship was not to push their respective companies but push Ruby in India.

After Obie’s keynote it was lunch time. I was tired and jetlagged so I walked around in a bit of a daze after my keynote was done. I did catch some of Aman’s talk about Ruby OO with objects instead of classes. What I saw sounded intruiging, but I didn’t get the full picture since I walked in and out of the presentation.

The highlight of the day was definitely Matz keynote, where he called in using Skype and did a presentation and some Q&A. Matz talked a bit about the history of Ruby and then started mentioning some things about the future of Ruby. The most interesting concrete information was that 1.9.2 will come this summer, and after that they will start work on 2.0. This version will also make some heavier changes, some of them which I’m not sure I like (such as requiring parenthesis for invocation).

The second day started out with Nick Sieger from EngineYard talking about the next version of Rails. Lots of useful information about what we can expect from the next major revision. Compared to mine and Obie’s keynotes, this was shock full with technical information instead of high level concepts. Good stuff.

After that, Pradeep Elankumaran from Intridea doing a very interesting session about startups. His talk ended up being a long discussion with most of the audience about startups. This discussion kept most people in the audience interested enough to stay long into lunch time. Very good session.

After lunch I had a major conflict of interest. Both colleagues of mine had interesting sessions going. Sarah Taraporewalla talking about Ruby view technology and Sidu Ponnappa and Niranjan Paranjape talking about entropy in long running Ruby projects. I ended up choosing Sarah’s talk – which was brilliant. She did a great job explaining why the current view technologies are generally too permissive and make it harder to test the behavior of your view correctly.

Of course, Sidu and Niranjan got good reviews – and I heard lots of things that sounded like it was a session full of controversial ideas. Sounds like fun – wish I’d been there too.

The next session was about building a Ruby Application Server. Sadly, I’d kinda misunderstood what this session was about, since I was assuming that “Application Server” was meant in the Java environment meaning. This was not the case – instead it was about implementing a Ruby web server. I kinda lost interest quite quickly and ended up doing some work instead.

Brian Guthrie’s replacement session was called “Advanced Ruby Idoms so clean you can eat off of them”, and was both hilarious and very on point. The room was standing room full and Brian’s presentation sparked lots of debate. The gist of it was that basically there is no such thing as magic in programming. Everything is a function of your understanding of what’s going on in the language. You can have good code or bad code. Clean code and dirty code. But magic code just means you don’t understand the language, and is not really something you should use as an argument for or against an implementation. Brian expanded on this by giving loads of tips and tricks on what to do and what not to do.

I didn’t catch the final session, since I was very tired at that point. After the final session, Roy Singham came back with a keynote about a number of different things. He talked about the current state of agile in the world, the Ruby and Rails culture in the US, and how that should inform the Ruby culture in India, what things Unicef has been doing lately with Rails and other technology, and how we can use new technology to start being more socially responsible. The keynote sparked a lot of debate, and as usual Roy made quite a large amount of controversial statements in soundbite form. Take a look at my twitter stream for this weekend to get some quotes.

All in all, I think this was a total success. Lots of interesting talks, fantastic networking opportunities and a great vibe in the air. Looking at the tweets from the conference, RubyConf India seems to have been very appreciated by a large majority of all attendees. Here’s hoping for an even better next year!

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: bangalore, conference, india, presentations, rubyconf, rubyconf india. | #

I am part of a team at ThoughtWorks helping out organizing the very first RubyConf in India. I’m very excited about this. So if you have the possibility to come to Bangalore, the event will be March 20 and 21.

We already have some solid speakers lined up. Chad Fowler will keynote, and so will I, and we have a number of other people coming in. A few of my colleagues from ThoughtWorks, such as Sarah Taraporewalla, Sidu Ponnappa and Aman King. Other speakers include Hemant Kumar, Pradeep Elankumaran, Arun Gupta and others. Finally, Nick Sieger will also come to Bangalore for this event!

So as you can see, this is gearing up to be a great event! Hope to see you there.

4 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: bangalore, conferences, india, ruby, rubyconf, rubyconf india. | #

I’ve just come back from several different conferences. It’s been tiring but also very rewarding. The conferences I attended and presented at was QCon San Francisco, RubyConf and JRubyConf. I thought I’d just mention some of the highlights from these three events.

First QCon – after JAOO, QCon is my favorite conference. They always manage to put together an interesting week with great speakers and lots of things to learn. This year, me and Martin Fowler did a full-day tutorial about domain specific languages.

During the Wednesday I spent most of my time hanging out and chatting with people. I did attend Josh Blochs and Bob Lee’s Java Puzzler presentation. This is always an entertaining hour. I also enjoyed Douglas Crockfords keynote about the history and future of JavaScript. Hearing how this all happened is always enlightening.

On the Thursday I had my track about languages. I think it went very well, my speakers did a great job. Eishay Smith talk about Scala, Stu Halloway about Clojure, Martin Fowler about Ruby, Jonathan Felch about Groovy and Amanda Laucher and Josh Graham about F#. I’m very happy with how it went, actually.

During Friday I mostly sat in on Neal Fords DSL track. My colleague Brian Guthrie started out with a strong hour about internal DSLs in various languages. Ioke got a few code examples, which was fun. After that Neal and Nate Schutta talked about MPS. I haven’t seen this much detail about MPS before so it was helpful.

After lunch Don Box and Amanda Laucher did a talk about the technology formerly known as Oslo. I didn’t think this tech was anything cool at all until I saw this presentation. In retrospect this was probably my favorite presentation of the conference. What came together was how you can use M as a fully typed language with some interesting characteristics, and also the extremely powerful debug features. It’s nice indeed.

Glenn Vanderburg put forward some arguments against language workbenches. This made for an interesting hour but I’m not entirely sure I buy his arguments. And after that Magnus Christerson from Intentional showcased what they’ve been working on lately. Very impressive stuff as usual.

I only spent one day at RubyConf, but it was still enough to get a feeling for what was going on, spend some time with several people I haven’t met before and so on. Good times. Charles Nutter did a very good presentation about his Ruby mutants (Duby and Surinx). After that Ryan Davis and Aaron Patterson did a hilarous presentation about weird software.

JRubyConf was a total success. All of the presentations were very interesting, and provided insight into what people liked about JRuby and what they wanted from it. It was fantastic to see so many people come together just for JRuby. It’s great to be part of that. I did a presentation about testing with JRuby, and then I was part of the closing panel. Both went well.

All in all a great week of conferences.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, jruby | tags: jruby, jrubyconf, qcon, qcon san francisco, qconsf, rubyconf, san francisco. | #

I’m gearing up for the next conference stretch. This time it’s San Francisco next week, and I really hope to see lots of people at these conferences – they are gearing up to be something special.

First QCon San Francisco. Except for JAOO, QCon is the best general developer conference I’ve ever been to. Go check out the schedule at http://qconsf.com. This year I’m very excited about doing a full day tutorial about domain specific languages together with Martin Fowler.

I’m also in charge of the languages track, where I have five people who will talk about their experiences with different languages. This time there will not be much introduction to the languages, but instead experience reports, objective descriptions of what worked, what didn’t work and how you can improve your chances of success. The languages covered are Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Groovy and F#. Should be great fun.

Hopefully I will have lots of time to see other presentations too. There are many I would love to see. ThoughtWorks also happens to be a sponsor of QCon, so there will be a booth where it’s a big possibility you can find me or my colleagues.

I will do one day of RubyConf – the Saturday. Funnily enough I haven’t ever been to RubyConf, so I’m looking forward to this too.

Finally, the first ever JRubyConf will happen next Sunday. The program looks really interesting. I’m going to be talking about testing, and also be part of the ending JRuby Core Team panel.

I’m very excited about these conferences. Hope to see you there!

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, jruby | tags: jruby, jrubyconf, qcon, qcon san francisco, qconsf, rubyconf, san francisco. | #