Well, today was the first day of RubyConf 2006, and I’d been looking forward to it since RailsConf 2006 ended. Before RailsConf ever started, I made a comment to some friends that I would do my best to blog about the talks that I attend. Unfortunately, I didn’t (and still don’t) have a laptop so that I could ‘live blog’ the presentations I went to as they were happening (in other words cheat and simply type the talk word for word rather than getting the chance to form an opinion.) Because of this I resorted to taking a series of notes that I had plans to compile into some sort of article once I got back to Colorado, as I was also stuck in Chicago for 3 days without computer access.

As a result, I did what any sufficiently lazy programmer would do – nothing. To this day I still have my little RailsConf tablet of notes sitting next to this very desk, but have not taken the time to write anything. One of the main reasons for this is that after so many years of typing day in and day out, my handwriting is painfully slow and atrocious at the same time. Basically my notes are bulleted 3 word reminders of things during each talk, that I had intended to use to refresh my memory.

Every single person that knew I had intended to blog the talks, has given me endless amounts of crap over the fact that there’s no browsable log of the ones that I visited. In fact, one of them ‘challenged’ me to run home during the dinner break (three freaking hours?!) and blog about the days events while they were still fresh in my mind. Now, although there’s nothing at stake, I hate losing to guys named ‘Lee’, and thus here I am.

Before I get started let me just reiterate the fact that I had no laptop (or pen) to jot down any notes, so everything is straight from memory (uh oh) and I anticipate that it will be borderline incoherent at best. Also note that this is the dinner break, and there will be another post made later on in the night chronicaling the round table discussion with our favorite japanese guy, Yukihiro Matsumoto.

Ok, so let’s get down to business.

I arrived at the Embassy at around 8:30 this morning with the sole intention to see Zed Shaw’s talk. Aside from that talk, Life after mkmf by Kevin Clark, and The History of Ruby by Masayoshi Takahashi, I was expecting the day to be fairly boring.

First up on the agenda was grabbing food from the little continental breakfast bar, and struggling to stay awake for the what seemed like days that everyone took to set things up. Fair enough, it took me as long to wander around aimlessly in search of a chair in the small conference room. OK, I realise the conference room wasn’t really as small as I’m making out, but it did have that horrible lined tables setup that made it pretty awkward to navigate to and frow. That said, I did think the hotel was leaps and bounds ahead of the super crappy diggs at RailsConf. RailsConf did sport a much wider conference room, but also had a track system and an equally as awkward pegboard of circular tables that made bumping in to everyone in the room a simple waiting game.

At any rate, once the conference started, and the welcome message was given, Masayoshi Takahashi’s talk The History of Ruby began.

An interesting thing to note is that Masayoshi gave his entire talk in a kimono. The talk was very nicely done, in that his signature style was used on the slides, making them readable from the moon, and was broken into 5 sections. Which, if I remember correctly were something like prehistory, ancient, middle-age, modern-age, and contemporary-age – all representing periods in the history of Ruby. Some funny slides were shown containing chat logs of how Ruby was named, and there were a few screenshots of some of the Ruby related websites back in the day. There was also a list of interesting facts, such as there having been some 20 Ruby books written in Japan between 2001 and 2002. Unfortunately I don’t remember much more from this talk.

Next up was Evan Phoenix, with Sydney and Rubinius: Hardcore Ruby. I honestly thought this talk was going try and relate Ruby to some obscure Greek myths or something, but luckily that wasn’t the case. However the talk could almost literally be condensed into “I’m going to blow everyone’s mind with how technical this non technical talk with complex sounding sentences is going to be. Basically I’m writing something similar to PyPy that implements Ruby in Ruby. A lot of the code is pretty basic and I stole the ideas from everyone.”

Just joking, actually the talk was fairly interesting, and Evan did get into a good amount of detail regarding the project. Though he did seem to have a problem with remembering to repeat the questions asked by the audience.

Lunch immediately followed Evan’s talk, and for some stupid reason I went to Burger King. However, I couldn’t have gone to just any old Burger King, oh no, I had to go to the one right next to work that I go to nearly every day, that always seems to screw my order in some ridiculous way. Why I give those idiots money on a daily basis is beyond me.

Anyway, fast forward an hour and a half to the start of session 2, with the first slot going to none other than the man behind the decent Gruff graphics library, and the Ruby on Rails Podcast.

I have to be honest, I didn’t expect much from this talk, and I felt I received exactly what I was expecting. Geoffrey did a good job of listing a few of the graphics libraries available to Ruby, and did show some examples and small code fragments to illustrate what’s ‘possible’ when you ‘program graphics’. The talk wasn’t bad at all, it just seemed pretty basic to be showing at RubyConf.

After Geoffrey was Kevin Clark’s Life after mkmf, which was a semi generic overview of what he’s accomplished on mkrf (make rakefile) which is a Google Summer of Code project that was set in place to destroy the mess that is mkmf (make makefile.) It seems like a lot of work has been done, and it does look to be a welcomed successor to mkmf for the activity and documentation alone. I also sensed a bit of tension between Ryan Davis and Kevin Clark surrounding a comment Ryan made regarding the fact that mkrf is unnecessarily generating files when we have such a ‘beautifully dynamic language available to us’. To a great extent I agree with what Ryan expressed, but I’m still looking forward to using mkrf.

Moving on to the meat and potatoes of todays talks, Zed Shaw’s Iron Mongrel: Fuzzing, Auditing, Thrashing, Risk and The Ways Of Mongrel Destruction was a very well presented talk. It was basically a why and why not for Fuzzing, with all of the humor you’d expect from Zed. There was also a rather good overview of RFuzz and some of the other fuzzing libraries like Peach and how they’re used. Another bonus was that Zed’s talk was much more technical than any of the other talks, and nearly every slide featured code. The only downside was that the font size was so incredibly small that I couldn’t make out anything more than a haze of smokey looking horizontal lines that appeared indented. Zed expressed that he just wanted to do something a bit different for his slides, but to the distress of everyone in attendence, the lights remained on throughout the talk, and the font was never bumped up to readability.

The last talk before the dinner break was Radiant—Content Management Simplified by John Long. I was silently hating on this talk before it was even given. After the talk started I really regretted having done that. To my amazement, the talk wasn’t dry at all. It featured a ‘live’ install and setup, every option was explored to some extent, and many of the slides gave us a taste of the code behind the scenes. During the talk all I could think about was “holy crap, why the hell did I pass this up for typo? this looks quite a bit better written and certianly much easier to integrate with an existing application…”

I thought the usefulness and implementation (not shown but you could figure it out pretty easily from the way they were being used) of behaviors was pretty nice, though I thought the tagging system was a bit of a let down, and maybe even slightly misguided. The talk also featured some really entertaining composite images created by the Ruby Identity Team while trying to come up with a new look for Ruby’s home. After that last presentation I’m seriously considering throwing typo to the curb (even though it’s been here less than a week!) and replacing it with the very clean Radiant. This just goes to show you that checking out 3 blog systems and giving up is a mistake. I passed on Radiant because my initial thoughts were that it was just a very trivial CMS with none of the frills of a traditional blog, such as comments, feeds, etc – which it is. However, after watching John demo it for us, it turns out it’s exactly what I was looking for all along, and we were even assured that blogesque features such as comments are on their way!

At any rate, I need to grab a bite and get back to the conference in time to see some questions answered by Matz!

Stay tuned for an after-roundtable post sometime tonight.