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Silicon Valley Ruby Conference - Day 2

Posted on: 2006-04-24

More Notes from the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference

As for Day 1, I'm leaving the actual details to other people, and just including as many clever or interesting remarks as I can.

Day 2 had more stable wi-fi, and the room wasn't as stuffy. Presentations were still good and covered a wide range of topics and styles - although a drinking game built around the phrases 'domain-specific language', 'metaprogramming', and 'Saphir-Worf hypothesis' would have been pretty successful. Interestingly, while one presenter had a speaking style and tone that reminded me a lot of Joss Whedon, another presenter looked and acted a whole lot like Wash, the pilot from Whedon's Firefly series.

In his opening comments, Mike Slinn showed how people can do pair-programming remotely with VNC or even just the 'screen' command in UNIX. I work freelance and so don't get to work with other programmers much - so if anybody wants to try this, send me a note at my email address listed above.

I managed to get a seat near a power-bar, so I was able to take notes on my PowerBook, but quotes here are still loosely paraphrased and, as before, any misrepresentations or errors are entirely my fault.

Generally overheard

Mike Slinn: Opening Comments

Steve Baker - Behaviour Driven Development

Jason Hoffman - Scale With Rails

Joe O'Brien - Create Your Own Tools: Building DSLs With Ruby

Alex Chaffee - Anatomy of an Agile Web 2.0 App

Joel VenderWerf - Mixing Ruby and C for High Performance Hybrid System Simulation

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