Tuesday, March 27, 2012

RubyConf India, 2012

This was my/the 3rd RubyConf, first time in Pune. Like last year, I couldn't/wouldn't submit a talk. But I did manage to buy a ticket in time, before they got sold out. My friends were over, and very dear to me that they are, we stayed up Friday night playing UNO, until it was 7am. 8am I was up and reached the Hyatt Regency venue by 9.

Day 1

After the Welcome speech, it was Charles @headius Nutter with his keynote on JRuby and other Ruby VMs. It was great to know how the other ruby VMs were coming along, and how IronRuby was dying. Next was a recorded video keynote by Matz. I started missing the first RubyConf India, where we had the opportunity of having Matz on a Skype video conference. Matz said one place Ruby lags behind Python is SciPy and NumPy, and they would focus on having that in Ruby in the next few years.

After a coffee-break I was attending Ruby CLI talk byNikhil Mungel and Shishir Das. I was a bit put off on having to see only slides in a talk which could have made more interesting by throwing in some cool CLI demos. Next I was attending Tejas Dinkar and Jasim A Basheer's talk on Sandboxing Ruby Code, where they discussed their experiences on developing rubymonk.com.

As usual, lunch was awesome. I met lots of people, unlike my previous RubyConfs, where I operated as a lone shark.

Post lunch (and a bit drowsy) I was attending the Everything Ruby talk by Ajay Gore. It wasn't very interesting. Next up during the Clojure talk by Steven Deobald, I was feeling a bit lost. Noticing nothing interesting lined up next, I headed home.

Day 2

Next morning's keynote was by Mikel Lindsaar. It was a motivational speech, which talked about purpose and value exchange in software development and life in general.

Post coffee, I attended Sou Sheong's talk on Sex, Money and Evolution. That was one of the most interesting talks I have ever seen. He took some virtual bots called roids, and simulated a culture of them after adding external parameters like energy (money), reproduction (sex) and natural selection (evolution). The result was a beautiful visualization of life. Most of it was written using Ruby and R, so I would have been a happy puppy has he demonstrated some of his code. But the source code is on github, so I could have a look at it later. The session was very interactive.

I tried attending the next talk titled "What lies beneath the beautiful code", but the sheer uninterestingness, and the fact that people started walking out ensured I followed suit.

Lunch, again, was full of #win.

Post lunch I attended "Smells and patterns in test/spec code", by Sidu Ponnappa and Aninda Kundu. It talked about the anti-patterns while writing tests. After that I spent some time in the Hack Room discussing some list archive crawler ideas with Anurag, and clicking photos, which I won't publish. No.
Later I found myself in the method_missing should be recursive talk by Matthew Kirk.

Post a couple_of_cutting_chai_and_sandwiches, I was attending the lighting talks. Highlights were nursery_rhymes.rb by Shakthi Kannan and Users == Bugs by Charles Nutter. And that was how RubyConf India 2012 ended.

Some observations

The quality of talks this time wasn't really upto the mark. Some talks were really great, but some were just downright bad. Most of the talks were unrelated to the Ruby language. And many failed to excite the audience. I know it's easy to criticize when I myself didn't submit a talk, but then I will make sure that doesn't happen in RubyConf India 2013.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice information on ruby on rails, this information is very helpful for offshore software development company

deeksha said...

your blog is informative and it is very good and informative too, thanks for providing these information.

Best Android Training Institute in Chennai

Mika Farron said...

Orang tampaknya cukup puas dengan kemenangan kecil, dan mereka akan memberi toleransi pada kerugian kecil,” kata salah satu penulis penelitian, Sridhar Narayanan, pada waktu itu
asikqq
dewaqq
sumoqq
interqq
pionpoker
bandar ceme
hobiqq
paito warna
http://199.30.55.59/sumoqq78/
datahk 2019

PoL said...

To give more freedom to your selection, we have listed both HTML and WordPress news website templates in this list. Select the best one that meets your needs.

Tony Chew said...

Anda dapat memutuskan untuk bertaruh melawan petinju A yang memenangkan pertarungan, sementara teman Anda memasang taruhan untuk petinju A yang memenangkan pertarungan. Pengaturannya, dalam istilah yang paling sederhana pokerpelangi
98toto

admin said...

Nicely explaned thanks for sharing..keep posting such a amazing post.
Movie4me
Raabta full movie

Foo Click said...

There are many companies who work on Ruby on Rails. It is a very strong software framework to be used. Men's Shirts for Beach

Stockal said...

Idea Coworking provides a professional work environment in Chandigarh, Zirakpur. It offers a holistic set of professional administrative services while you can focus on your work.
https://ideacoworking.com/