RubyConf Day 2

Sunday, March 22nd
Bangalore

I reached some 15 minutes late. Nick Sieger was already taking on "Exploring Rails 3 through choices". He was taking about/demoing some cool features coming up in Rails 3. I like the lazy querysets part, which was missing in Rails and was already available in Django.

Pradeep Elankumaran, a US based entrepreneur, then took the stage and talked about the huge trend of startups in India. The session was very interactive with Pradeep talking on "The Startup Mindset" and the people in the audience chipping in with their views/experiences on the startup trend. I was listening intently and reflecting why I am not ready to do a startup at this stage of my career. The discussion ate into the lunchtime.

Pradeep also mentioned and thanked Satish Talim and his efforts in spreading Ruby as a language in India.

Lunch was good.

Post lunch I sat through Sarah Taraporewalla's session "Taming of the View". She talked on how/why Rails erb templating sucks and mentioned other ways of developing good Views including a tool she developed called Slippers.

Vineet Tyagi talked next on how he build his Web Application Server, WebROaR. It was cool how he compared building an appserver to building a house and went ground up. He was very good at explaining stuff, it was like slitting in a classroom.

I then took a coffee break. I later realised I missed an awesome talk by Brian Guthrie on Advanced Ruby Idioms. The next talk "Hacking and learning from Open source Ruby (Open source Rubyisms)" by Sreekanth Vadagiri went totally over my head.

The last show at RubyConf India, 2010 was ThoughtWorks Founder/Chairman Roy Singham. I looked up Ry on the internet and found that he does not have a significant online presence, quite a surprising thing for the leader of a Company like ThoughtWorks. He talked about agile and other recent trends in the software industry and how they have been producing good results. There was a minor flame war between Roy and Obie when he mentioned the split between the Ruby and Rails community. He mentioned that the 28 women at RubyConf India was the maximum attendance for women at ant Ruby/Rails conference in the world. He wanted us to use our enthusiasm and help the not so fortunate people in India.

It was 6pm and I had to run to the BLR Airport for my flight at 8:30pm. What happened there is another story.

That's all.