March 24th, 2010
RubyConf India was a great success!
This weekend ThoughtWorks in collaboration with RubyCentral and several sponsors arranged the first ever RubyConf India. I was there as a keynote speaker and wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about the experience, since I think this was an event that showed how much pent up interest there really is for Ruby in India.
When planning the conference we aimed for about 150 delegates – but that sold out in a few days so we rearranged the event to accomodate about 400 people, and we managed to fill that. At the end of the day, there was about 420 people there, including both delegates and speakers.
Unfortunately there had been some problems with visas for Chad Fowler and Ivan Porto Carrero. We solved that by having Ivan present over Skype, and rearrange some of the talks and give Brian Guthrie a last minute spot.
The conference started out with Roy Singham, the founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, setting the tone for the rest of the conference by getting people to think about how India can start innovate for real using technologies such as Ruby.
After that I did a keynote about programming languages, quite similar to what I did at RailsWayCon in Berlin last year. Hopefully people thought it was interesting. I tried to first discuss why we need different languages, where some Ruby language features comes from, a small taxonomy of languages, and some ideas about what might happen in the future.
Obie Fernandez was next up with a controversial keynote called Blood, Sweat and Rails. The basics of the keynote was a description of different lessons Obie has learned from running HashRocket. The controversial bit was based around two different factors, the first being Obie’s heavy use of profanity. (Heavy enough that one of the organizers went up on stage halfway through the presentation and asked him to tone it down). The other controversial part was that Obie used his keynote spot to spend quite a lot of time promoting HashRocket. Later in the day, a representative from ThoughtWorks, and one representative from Castle Rock (another sponsor) went on stage, mentioning that the point of sponsorship was not to push their respective companies but push Ruby in India.
After Obie’s keynote it was lunch time. I was tired and jetlagged so I walked around in a bit of a daze after my keynote was done. I did catch some of Aman’s talk about Ruby OO with objects instead of classes. What I saw sounded intruiging, but I didn’t get the full picture since I walked in and out of the presentation.
The highlight of the day was definitely Matz keynote, where he called in using Skype and did a presentation and some Q&A. Matz talked a bit about the history of Ruby and then started mentioning some things about the future of Ruby. The most interesting concrete information was that 1.9.2 will come this summer, and after that they will start work on 2.0. This version will also make some heavier changes, some of them which I’m not sure I like (such as requiring parenthesis for invocation).
The second day started out with Nick Sieger from EngineYard talking about the next version of Rails. Lots of useful information about what we can expect from the next major revision. Compared to mine and Obie’s keynotes, this was shock full with technical information instead of high level concepts. Good stuff.
After that, Pradeep Elankumaran from Intridea doing a very interesting session about startups. His talk ended up being a long discussion with most of the audience about startups. This discussion kept most people in the audience interested enough to stay long into lunch time. Very good session.
After lunch I had a major conflict of interest. Both colleagues of mine had interesting sessions going. Sarah Taraporewalla talking about Ruby view technology and Sidu Ponnappa and Niranjan Paranjape talking about entropy in long running Ruby projects. I ended up choosing Sarah’s talk – which was brilliant. She did a great job explaining why the current view technologies are generally too permissive and make it harder to test the behavior of your view correctly.
Of course, Sidu and Niranjan got good reviews – and I heard lots of things that sounded like it was a session full of controversial ideas. Sounds like fun – wish I’d been there too.
The next session was about building a Ruby Application Server. Sadly, I’d kinda misunderstood what this session was about, since I was assuming that “Application Server” was meant in the Java environment meaning. This was not the case – instead it was about implementing a Ruby web server. I kinda lost interest quite quickly and ended up doing some work instead.
Brian Guthrie’s replacement session was called “Advanced Ruby Idoms so clean you can eat off of them”, and was both hilarious and very on point. The room was standing room full and Brian’s presentation sparked lots of debate. The gist of it was that basically there is no such thing as magic in programming. Everything is a function of your understanding of what’s going on in the language. You can have good code or bad code. Clean code and dirty code. But magic code just means you don’t understand the language, and is not really something you should use as an argument for or against an implementation. Brian expanded on this by giving loads of tips and tricks on what to do and what not to do.
I didn’t catch the final session, since I was very tired at that point. After the final session, Roy Singham came back with a keynote about a number of different things. He talked about the current state of agile in the world, the Ruby and Rails culture in the US, and how that should inform the Ruby culture in India, what things Unicef has been doing lately with Rails and other technology, and how we can use new technology to start being more socially responsible. The keynote sparked a lot of debate, and as usual Roy made quite a large amount of controversial statements in soundbite form. Take a look at my twitter stream for this weekend to get some quotes.
All in all, I think this was a total success. Lots of interesting talks, fantastic networking opportunities and a great vibe in the air. Looking at the tweets from the conference, RubyConf India seems to have been very appreciated by a large majority of all attendees. Here’s hoping for an even better next year!
