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!

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: bangalore, conference, india, presentations, rubyconf, rubyconf india. | #

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. | #