RubyConf India, Day 1

Saturday, March 21st
Bangalore

Arrived yesterday(Friday). Staying with my friends at BTM Layout. Its a bit far from the RubyConf venue.

Reached a bit late to the conference, (due to some venue location problems). I got my speaker/delegate kit. Ola Bini had already started with his talk on "The Future of Programming languages". He was talking of various programming languages and different programming paradigms, with special reference to Ruby.

Obie Fernandez came next with his talk titled - "Blood, Sweat and Rails 2010". His talk was pretty fun. From what I gather he worked with ThoughtWorks and now has his own company called HashRocket(both RubyConf India sponsors). His talk was filled with anecdotes from his work experience and their work culture. He also talked about Rails best practices. He used a lot of 'expletives' and was reprimanded for that.

After lunch(which was very tasty), I could be found sitting at the Sessions Hall(Track 1) looking through my slides and writing notes. There were a lot of people attending at the room, so I was a bit nervous. Ivan Porto Carrero could not make it to India so they set up a Skype video call for his talk - "IronRuby: The Ruby &.NET Love Child". There was a lot of technical glitches and the talk finished fast. I was next.

Because of all the confusion in the previous talk, the attendance had rarefied. I was feeling a bit more confident as a result(don't ask me why). I did not screw up much during my talk(except for the RoR requires a steep learning curve part, which the audience did not approve of; followed by a heated discussion). I had made my slides using Latex+Beamer(was an interesting experiment, came out good). I have shared them here.

I rushed to the main hall, where they were setting up a video call with Yukihiro (matz) Matsumoto, the developer/designer of Ruby. His talk was called 'Ruby 124C141+'. The name referred to a science fiction novel of a similar name. 124C41 meant "one to foresee for one", and he was basically all about the future of Ruby Language. His talk was interesting and informative. The audience went crazy.

After that I attended Sitting in Sai Venkatakrishnan & Hari Krishnan's talk "Concurrency patterns with Ruby"(which I did not pay much attention to) and "Mortal Kombat" presented by SlideShare Designer, Arun J and Lead Developer, Kapil Mohan(which was pretty interesting, and they addressed the code-embedded-in-template problem by using hquery).

I had lost my Relience Netconnect Datacard which I found mentioned on Gautam Rege's tweet.

Pre and during dinner I spent my time talking to the other delegate/speakers. Interacting with them was good fun. I had to leave at 8:30pm, otherwise I would not have got a bus back.

Stay tuned for Day 2.