Ruby Conf 2007 Part 1 Nov 05, 2007 12:29
Just got back from Ruby Conf 2007 in Charlotte NC. I had a great time and met a bunch of smart, fun and nice people. The conference was a great value for the money. This year was the first year I was lucky enough to attend and I'm grateful that it was close enough to DC and that I had the time/funds available. Here are my initial impressions from the first of hopefully many more Ruby Conf's that I will attend.
There were about 500+ people in attendance. Almost all of them used Macs. I've never seen such a concentration of iPhone's either. :) My eyeball estimate is that 90% of the developers there were using MacBooks of some kind. Out of the remaining 10%, more than half were running some flavor of linux (ubuntu seemed to be the most popular) on their laptops.
Contrary to another programming community's cynical and disconnected viewpoint regarding Apple products, the Mac is a superior platform for developing Ruby applications. IOW, there's a reason why Macs are more popular in the Ruby community...imagine that.
OSX has been shipping Ruby since Tiger (April 2005). They are now shipping Rails with Leopard, and have picked up the Ruby Cocoa project. They've also created a Scripting Bridge and they demonstrated the use of injecting Ruby into a running application to control it. Very cool. Here's a nice write up of the OSX session.
Anyway, I will say that some of the talks were really useful, inspiring and wonderfully entertaining. There were some real "gems" in the RejectConf sessions too (presenters that weren't accepted in the formal sessions had the opportunity to present in an informal one; great idea).
On the other hand, some of the presentations weren't so great for me. IMO, there were two recurring problems:
- The presentation's target audience was very advanced Ruby developers. With a conference attendance that doubles each year, half of the audience will be relative newbies. I'm one of those people. It would be helpful, even when discussing very advanced topics, to provide better "real world" context around the actual topic.
- Basic assumption that developing open source frameworks is the primary use for Ruby. I'm exaggerating a bit here, however an example of this focus is that when talking about "generating Ruby code", the context of the whole talk was about writing generators like Rails generators for new frameworks. What about addressing fundamental code generation first and foremost? As the community gets bigger, most developers will be developing applications, not frameworks.
In general, those issues are issues simply because Ruby Conf is experiencing growing pains. That's to be expected. It might be useful in subsequent years to have an indicator of assumed skill level associated with each abstract. Another thing that would have been nice is to have a way to provide feedback about the specific sessions. A simple Rails app would have been enough for the attendees to provide such feedback. Maybe next year. :)
Overall it was a really great experience and I'm glad I went. Looking forward to next year's conference!
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