John Paul Ashenfelter

I’ll be honest — I love RubyNation. I’ve been to it for the past 3 years, ever since I first started programming in Ruby on a regular basis. I’ve been to many conferences and I have to compliment the team on putting together yet another great program for 2010. It’s worth getting up at 5am and driving 2 hours plus the DC commute to hear what the high-quality lineup of speakers has to say and to connect with the Virginia/DC-area Ruby community.
Day 1 of RubyNation did not disappoint. Here’s a quick overview of the sessions I went to today: Glenn Vandenburg started the day in a single session track basically explaining what’s wrong with enterprise programming and why Ruby fits in well. This is probably the 20th time I’ve seen Glenn give a talk over the past 7 years on a wide variety of topics, moving from Java to Ruby to Agile and everywhere in between. Some tidbits:
* Companies want to get good results with average (or worse) programmers* Enterprise architecture protects against medidocre workers* Software creationalism — business focus focuses on cost of building initial app vs cost of maintaining over time* Paying for something gives perception (illusion) of value. “I bought Oracle and saved $300k instead of using MySQL for free* What enterprise needs is not what it wants — need code to be adaptable over time.
One key point was that big companies optimize to improve their metrics, so if you use the wrong metrics, you’re optimizing the wrong way.
* Good metric of code quality is cost of new feature over time
I think the right place for this talk is JavaOne or somewhere it’s not preaching to the choir — I’m pretty sure everyone in the audience agreed but Glenn did a great job kicking off the conference and reminding us why many of us came to Ruby from Java and other languages.
Big takeaway — still a lot of room for Ruby in the enterprise. requote dave thomas — ruby is glue that doesn’t set
Greg Pollack followed Glenn with a talk about “Decoding Yehuda” which is really about some of the key refactoring patterns that were used to build Rails 3. Lots of good meat in there for Ruby programmers *and* now that Rails source is a lot more readable, Rails developers can more easily understand their code.
Five major techniques
* Method compilation:
I skipped the next block to hang up — not too interested about innards of JRuby (Russ Olsen’s talk) or formal workflow systems (David Bock) thought I generally enjoy both speakers.
The highlight of the day for me was the next talk — Joe Damato and Aman Gupta explaining the details of Ruby garbage collection. Yeah — sounds exciting I know — but they gave a very clear overview of how Ruby allocates memory, how the garbage is collected, and how the different defaults of MRI and REE affect your app. The closed with an intro to memprof.com, sort of a NewRelic-y website for analyzing the memory profile of your rails stack. Definitely check that out.
Jim Weirich followed lunch with his SOLID Ruby talk, entertaining as he always is. Didn’t learn a lot that’s new personally, but was an entertaining romp through the fundamentals of Liskov Substitution, Single Dependency Principle, etc.
I started to fade in the afternoon thanks to my 5am wakeup call to get up to DC, so I started to pay less attention to the talks. There weren’t a lot of lightening talks during the block — Bryan Lyles skipped TATFT to suggest using DTerm, which is a free keystroke-combo terminal/command line utility. Nick Sieger’s talk about what’s going on in the Java-based Rails stack was useful for those of us with Java clients. Finally, Dave Thomas closed the day with one of his “Ruby Sucks!” talks, which is a lot of fun, but that he’s done at a number of conferences. Metrostar hosted the RubyBQ to end the evening and an early bedtime ended my first day.
Overall, I thought the day was worthwhile. It certainly wasn’t FutureRuby or JSConf or something similarly mindblowing, but it was a a good opportunity to network with the local Ruby crew, learn a few things (ruby garbage collection, WTF?) I wouldn’t have normally looked at, and get fired up about Ruby.
Mission accomplished.