Back from RubyConf 2006
I’m back from the Annual RubyConf, held this year in Denver Colorado. I had a blast. It was nice to put a lot of faces to names (e-mails).
The talks were wide-ranging from “The History of Ruby” to “YARV Compliation” and all over the place in their scope and topics, from hard-core techno-babble to pontification on how open-source principles might apply to a free-spirited consulting company.
One of the speakers couldn’t make it, so RubyCentral opted to use the 45 minutes to do 9 five-minute “Lightning Talks.” Derek and I signed up and presented the newest incarnation of Heartbeat, which demoed the live setup of an application for push-button deployment over the web using Capistrano. We got a lot of great feedback, and some of the other lightning talks were amazing.
Overall, the conference had a great sense of comradarie around this thing we know and love called Ruby. I can’t help but think that’s what it must have felt like during the first few Java conferences. I can’t speculate on the exact nature of where Ruby’s going, but with “official” support to the Ruby Community and presentations from respective members of the Sun, Microsoft, and Apple camps, things are looking good.
