I spent this Friday and Saturday in London at the RubyFoo conference, organized by Trifork. RubyFoo is a small pre-conference to the larger JAOO conference. As you might expect, it’s focused on Ruby, and it’s quite small. On the friday we were about 50 people, and on Saturday about 40. The small amount of people and the fact that all presentations were in the same track made it much easier to network and communicate with people. I liked the focus this gave to the conference, and it was also an excellent opportunity to meet new people and get new ideas.

On the Friday there were five presentations, and on the Saturday it was an open spaces. The five presentations were all focused around the area of communicative programming. I talked about JRuby and did several demonstrations of how JRuby can be used to call out to different languages. My examples included talking to Clojure, Erlang and Haskell.

After me, Aslak Hellesøy talked about Cucumber and how Cucumber supports lots of different programming languages. Very cool. Aslak always give good presentations.

We then had lunch, and then Sam Aaron gave an interesting talk about communicative programming, and the essence of what we are doing. Very cerebral, definitely something that sparked lots of thoughts in peoples minds.

Adam Wiggins gave a talk about Heruko. I haven’t actually tried Heruko yet, but it looks very cool.

Finally, Matz gave a talk about the different styles of programming in Ruby, tied in with his history of creating Ruby and what the inspirations were. Very nice.

On the Saturday my colleague Dan North facilitated the open spaces discussions. I gave a 30 minute talk about Ioke - people seemed to enjoy it. After that Dan North, me, Aslak and a few others had a discussion about static versus dynamic typing.

After lunch I held a discussion about Ruby 1.9, getting some ideas why people weren’t using it, and what problems the people using it had encountered.

Finally, me, Aslak and Sam sat down to add Ioke support to Cucumber. This went really well - and I liked pairing with Aslak. Sadly I couldn’t stay until we were done, but Aslak and the others continued while I was heading out to the airport.

All in all, RubyFoo was a great conference, and I hope they can keep the same size the next time. 50 people were really a great size, and I liked the discussions we had.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conference, london, matz, ruby. | #

There hasn’t been much interesting happening this summer, but the fall is shaping up to be pretty busy. I will be talking at several different conferences, and thought I’d mention when and where I will be appearing.

First, this week I’m presenting at JavaZone in Oslo. I will present at 11:45 tomorrow, talking about Ioke.

Next week is the JVM Language Summit in Santa Clara. It is shaping up to be a great collection of people with many interesting discussions and talks. Take a look at the details for the talks. The people there are some of the most experienced language developers and implementors in the world. It should be a blast. I will do a talk about Ioke, and also a workshop about the challenges of improving Ioke’s performance.

After that I will attend RubyFoo in London, Oct 2-3, where I will talk about JRuby. RubyFoo will feature Matz, Sam Aaron, Aslak Hellesøy, Adam Wiggins and me. It should be great fun!

At JAOO this year (Oct 4-9 in Aarhus, Denmark) I will do a tutorial about testing Java code with JRuby. This conference also looks like it will be great. Many interesting talks and speakers. And of course, JAOO is generally the best conference I’ve ever been to.

At Øredev in Malmö, Sweden (Nov 2-6), I will be talking about Ioke.

And finally, at QCon SF in San Francisco (Nov 16-20) I will be hosting a track on emerging languages. After JAOO, QCon is my favorite conference, so I think it will be very nice too.

So, several interesting conferences coming up. Hope to see many of you there!

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conference, conferences, jaoo, javazone, jvm language summit, london, malmö, oredev, oslo, presentations, qcon, qcon san francisco, qconsf, rubyfoo, san francisco, santa clara. | #

During Saturday I attended the Scala LiftOff conference. THere were about 50-60 people there this year - many interesting people. The format of the conference was to have everyone propose sessions to talk about, and then put them in different time slots. This worked out great in practice, except for the small detail that the place we were in had terrible acoustics. It was extremely hard to make out what people were saying at times.

The exceptions to the unconference format were Martin’s keynote talk, before we started, and also something they called speedgeeking. I’ll talk more about that later.

So, Martin Odersky talked about the next five years of Scala - this information is pretty well covered in Dean Wamplers blog entry about the BASE meeting. I am impressed by some of the things they’re planning for the future.

After that I decided to attend a session John Rose put together, about JSR 292, invoke dynamic, and other features we could add to the JVM to make life for Scala easier. This turned into a pretty interesting discussion about different things. Martin Odersky was there and gave his perspective on what kind of features would be most useful. He was specially interested in interface injection and tail-call optimization, but we managed to cover quite a lot of ground in this discussion.

During the next slot I ended up being a butterfly - no session was really extremely interesting.

We had lunch and during that I saw Alex Payne describe some of the things they are doing at Twitter using Scala. After that came the speedgeeking. The basic idea was that twelve people should do small demos, max five minutes. They would do those demos for a smaller group of people, and then switch group - until everyone had seen those demos. I didn’t like this concept at all, and the way it worked out was just annoying - I ended up talking to John Rose and Martin Odersky for most of the time.

After that, me, Josh and Amanda figured that the weather was very nice so we moved our sessions outside. This also solved the problem with the bad acoustics. The first one of the outside sessions was Martin convening people to talk about equality and hash code semantics. The way implicits work right now make for some very strange and unexpected cases - such that “bob”.reverse == “bob” is not true. There are also several intricacies in how to handle hash code calculation for mutable collections. We didn’t really come to any conclusions, but Martin was happy that he’d gone through the available options and thoughts pretty thouroughly.

After that Josh and Amanda led a discussion about what kind of patterns we’re starting to see in functional object-oriented hybrid languages. Amandas experience with F# came in handy when comparing to the approaches used in Scala. No real conclusions here either, but lots of interesting discussions. My one mental note was to look up a recent OBJ paper, detailing an Object calculus. This reference came from Paul Snively.

After that the conference was over - me, Josh and Amanda was joined by Paul Snively for a beer. That ended up with me ranting about programming languages, as usual…

All in all, Scala LiftOff was a great conference, with a collection of many interesting people from several language communities. This ended up sparking very interesting discussions.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conference, liftoff, san francisco, scala. | #

It is less than a month to RailsWayCon in Berlin, so I thought I’d mention it here. This look like it will be a very nice conference. The dates are May 25 to May 27, in Berlin, Germany.

I will do two presentations and one keynote there. The presentations will be “JRuby Internals” and “Ioke for Ruby developers”. The keynote is called “Present and future of programming languages” and will feature my typical kind of ranting about programming languages.

Anyway. Hope to see you in Berlin! You can find more information here: http://it-republik.de/conferences/railswaycon.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, ioke | tags: berlin, conference, conferences, ioke, jruby, keynote, presentations, railswaycon. | #

On Tuesday, the Scandinavian Developer Conference will happen in Gothenburg. It’s turning out to be a really nice conference with lots of cool presentations. ThoughtWorks is hosting a track on Emerging Technology, where we’ll have lots of things that I have a particular interest in.

In my track there will be a presentation about Erlang, by Erik Stenman. I have a presentation about Groovy, and one about JRuby. I have a talk by John Davies about cloud computing, and one about Scala. And I also have a session about Smalltalk, and finally Marcus Ahnve will give a talk called “The simplest thing that could possibly work”. All in all it will be a great day. Hope to see you there.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conference, presentations, scandinavian developer conference, sdc. | #