I just took a break from DigtheDirt to attend RubyWorld in Japan. It was an amazing experience. These are the highlights:
- Tim Bray gave a talk on what’s right and what’s wrong with Ruby. I particularly enjoyed his social challenge. We are lucky to work on a language where jobs are plentiful. We can choose to work on projects that make the world better.
- Jeremy Kemper gave a talk partially on Rails 3.0 (the ActiveRecord enhancements will be much appreciated, extending the concepts in named scopes from the inside out), but he also addressed the expanding rift between Rails and Ruby in the support communities.
- Evan Phoenix gave an impressive talk on how Rubinius does hot spot compilation, and showed some performance metrics. (I believe that Rubinius represents the future of Ruby. It will eventually be faster to iterate in Ruby than C.)
- And, of course, Matz gave several talks, addressing the open source development process for Ruby and his motivation to make happy programmers.
There were many others, including Ruby in China (Stephen Kong), several on standardization, and a few case studies.
Matsue really knows how to put on a conference. Matz, your home town did a great job. I have a couple of pictures of our tour of a local garden’s trees, water features, and overview.
I also met the translator of From Java to Ruby. The book was much more popular there. I signed many books, in both English and Japanese. Ruby is gaining traction slowly there, but developers love it. A book about how to convince your manager how to make the move makes much more sense in Japan. Here, the question is often how to write Ruby in the first place. It was gratifying to meet many of my readers, though I felt a little too much like a rock star.
Thank you, all of my friends in Matsue. The experience was one I’ll never forget.