Ruby Kaigi 2010 Day 3

29 Aug 2010

Last day of Ruby Kaigi! Sad to see it go, it’s been a great conference. As per usual Tweets are in bulleted italics and the rest is after the fact commentary.

First I’ve got to show you the commemorative fans they were handing out:

It's the creators of Ruby and PHP

It’s Matz and… Someone else (sorry if it’s obvious - I don’t know). And of course they are programing in the bath.

Bummer.

Oh good. Wait, is that in 1.9.2 or trunk. I’d have to be in 1.9.2 right? To the Google! … Yep, seems like it made it in: http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/3285

But I think the point of talking about sig figs was that it’s coming soonish in Ruby. 1.9.3?

That is one crappy interface. Taking in only strings is frustrating and weird. How did this happen?

The irrational numbers thing sounds pretty cool. Since I mostly sling around strings for my day job I don’t know that I’ll ever use it. But purely for Ruby pride I like to see ruby challenge Python’s rising dominance in the sciences and maths.

Look, this has been a great conference and any slights I’ve tended to overlook because they’ve really done a heroic job of keeping the admission price down but that lack of a passing period is just… Well I don’t see why they did it. Just having the time as a buffer in case talks run over is reason alone. Moreover, no passing period traps people in sessions that they’d rather not be in and restricts choice.

Translation is volunteer and best-effort so it adds some challenge to attending sessions in a foreign language. So if I make any mistakes in this here blog, that’s what I’m blaming it on.

Just a little tidbit dropped at the end of the NArray presentation – sounds pretty cool. Masahiro Tanaka is using it drive his workflow in his scientific research.

Great talk and very honest. The type inference thing looks promising but there are a couple of tough hurdles to clear. Maybe some day. Until then there’s always Mirah.

Cool, let’s all move to Ruby AOT!

Oh. Never mind. Plus, compiling. Boo. Hiss.

I gotta tell ya the audience was chomping at the bit to get a hold of this profiler. You can run it in production for christ’s sake! And the GUI is to die for.

Very cruel of Tetsu Soh not to mention this up front. I’m sure it was an oversight but everyone was crazy disappointed. Still this was one of the best talks of the conf. Tetsu Soh is one to watch.

Indeed. I’m famous (on the internet (in one corner)) so you should listen to me.

I’m not the only one who noticed this so I’m not crazy.

Please post it on the ‘Goodies’ section of the Ruby Kaigi site. Or tweet about it. Something.

There was this weird hostile vibe coming from Shay. I felt like he hated us for liking Apple products. The weird thing is that there are a lot fewer Apple computers here than at a normal Ruby Conf. Maybe he thought we were all Microsoft haters and so he might as well fire first. Seemed like a mistake.

Another markup language because we needed more. I feel like the IronRuby team really needs a win. They’ve been the slowest progressing Ruby VM for a long time now.

Pretty neat trick that. Of course it means making your site dependent on silverlight. No worse than depending on Flash I guess.

It’s all coming along, I’d just like to see something working at this point in its life.

So did you know why everyone uses symbols? Or did you just do it because that’s the convention. Yeah, me too but then I learned. I’m not going to say how long ago that was.

That’s one of those rough moments where you really feel bad for the presentor. But he handled it like a champ – continuing the presentation while he waited for his machine to boot back up. Well done. I wish I got more out of the talk but it was one of those inspirational talks that are hard to translate. The Japanese speaking audience seemed to love it.

Huh. Why did that seem like a good idea. Since when does asking a room full of people to download something all at once ever work. And yet, it seems it happens once a conference. Repeat after me: Never ever depend on the network at a conference.

Funny story time. All through the conference I spent a lot of time staring at the IRC screens on either side of the stage where the translations happen. But since it’s just IRC, anyone can join the room. There was this one guy who posted A LOT and everyone of the posts seemed to be either:

888888888888

or

wwwwwwwwww

I later found out that 888888 means clapping and wwwww means laughter. OK but stop cluttering up the screen that I’m trying to read translations off of. Then I found out who sora_h was: He’s 14 and his name is Shota Fukumori. He got up and gave an entertaining lightning talk. Turns out he’s a Ruby commiter so he’s got that on me.

Young programmer

And, all of a sudden, it was time for the final keynote by Chad Fowler. He gave a talk about how to live a remarkable life and it was good stuff.

Lots of gems in there.

There was something about the theme being “The Last Ruby Kaigi” but I think it was sort of a joke making fun of some guy who posted a rant about how the Ruby Kaigis need to end. I didn’t have enough background to get it.

Oh, I forgot to talk about the guy hawking “The Last Google Wave Book Ever Published.” It seems he had been working on a Google Wave book and it was printed on the same day Google announced the end of wave. His response? To shamelessly promote the book at Ruby Kaigi in a lightning talk, at some sort of hallway session (with 30 people gathered around), and pretty much everywhere else. And I actually saw some people carrying the book around. Did they buy it? Who knows – his positive personality was so powerful I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

The Last Google Wave book ever published

Ruby Kaigi was an excellent time. I thought it might be crazy intimidating but everyone was super nice and there were enough english speakers so that I could always get my ideas across. Go if you have the chance.

Also, check out my every growing set of Ruby Kaigi photos at Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakescruggs/sets/72157624815648014/