This Monday I took a trip to Amsterdam to attend and present at Amsterdam.rb. TTY, the company hosting this months meeting, had managed to get a pretty interesting lineup, and about 70 people turned up (in fact, that was the limit, so it might be possible to get more people).

This was my first time in Amsterdam, but due to me being really, really sick, I didn’t get to see much of the city. I did manage to spend a few hours with Sam Aaron and his Haskell friends, discussing programming languages and Ioke specifically. Much fun.

There were six sessions planned, but since the schedule was busted from the beginning, the TTY talk on quality had to be removed (which is a shame – I was interested in what it would be about).

The first presentation was a discussion about a tool that could convert UML and YAML description files into scaffolding with internal associations. The main goal for the tool seemed to be to really rapidly get an application started, but the workflow goes totally against the way I generally write Rails apps, so I had a hard time seeing any utility for myself.

After that, Martijn van Excel gave a presentation about OpenStreetMap. I found this extremely interesting. The project seems to be the wikipedia equivalent of maps, which means that areas that Google aren’t interested in mapping will still get mapped in OSM. An example Martijn displayed was a large city in the Philippines, where Google really didn’t have much information, while OSM was extremely detailed. After some discussions and questions, it does seem that OSM has the same drawbacks as wikipedia – spurious updates, trust issues and so on, but I didn’t get the feeling that OSM had implemented the same kind of verification structures that wikipedia uses – at least not yet. All in all a cool project, though. Will definitely consider it if I ever need to do map-based mashups. The lack of geocoding might be a problem, of course.

After Martijns presentation there was a break, and then it was my turn to talk about Ioke. All in all, I spent way to much time explaining some intricacies of the syntax, which meant I didn’t have enough time to talk about the really important stuff – things like macros and the testing and documentation tools. I need to reconsider how to present the material without getting bogged down with details that doesn’t matter as much. All in all I’m still happy about it, though. You can download my slides at: http://ioke.org/presentations/Amsterdam.rb.pdf.

After my talk, Ninh Bui and Hongli Lai from Phusion talked about how they do design by contract. It was a very polished presentation, and I liked the way they did it – but I still felt that I didn’t grasp exactly how they applied DbC. I would have liked to have a long discussion with them about it, since the presentation gave the impression that the main way they did DbC was by duplicating the contracts in comments, in code and in tests. Interesting discussion on how DbC interacts with LSP (Liskov’s Substitution Principle). Once I realized it was isomorphic to the way bounded generics work in parametric polymorphism, it became much simpler to get my head around.

The final talk was about RubyCocoa. At that point my fever had started to fry my brain, so I didn’t really get much out of that talk.

All in all, a great time. Met many interesting people and had some good discussions. The Amsterdam hackers are obviously very cool and I hope I can get back there sooner or later.

There is some photos from the event here: http://amsterdamrbfebruari09hostedbytty.shutterfly.com/.

By Ola Bini | In: ioke | tags: amsterdam.rb, ioke, presentations. | #