Rails Summit finished a few days ago and I have only one word to describe it: Awesome!
I met some really cool people, discussed a whole bunch of technical subjects and managed not to get so nervous in my first presentation ever - I’m not counting internal presentations I’ve done for my team…
My slides and source files can be found here. Feel free to contact me with questions if you got any.
I’ll be speaking at this year’s Rails Summit Latin America in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It will be a good opportunity to meet some amazing people and visit friends back home! 
Overall I’ll be spending 12 days in Brazil, with 2 of them dedicated to the conference. The other 10 I’ll be in Rio de Janeiro visiting my family and friends. I strongly advise you to spend some time in Rio too, if at all possible. It’s an amazing city and you can contact me if you have any questions.
Back to the conference, my session is called JRuby in the enterprise world: Using Rails with legacy code, and will be given in the form of a tutorial. I will walk you through some problems we had while making this kind of integration at my company, focusing mostly on dependency management.
At the end I hope you’ll have a good understanding of what JRuby is capable of in a legacy environment.
If you’re planning to attend and would like to hear anything specific about JRuby, please let me know, I can try and squeeze in.
C u there!
As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.
If you’ve been following both JRuby and Ola Bini for the past year or so, you’ve noticed the trend and evolution of this alternative - and so far the most complete one - implementation of the ruby language. Specially at conferences.
Last year at QCon London, Ola was also talking about JRuby. At Euruko ‘08, in Prague, Charles Nutter also talked about it. RailsConf in Berlin also had its share. What all these talks had in common is that they talked about JRuby from a user/developer point of view. They were selling the solution. Convincing people to use it and presenting successful use cases.
And as the trend goes on, JRuby is now faced as a true alternative - one that we, btw, believe here at the company as we’re actively using it - and it seems that now the call is for help. Help to make JRuby an even more complete and overall better ruby implementation. Charles’ call for help was a great step. As he states, it’s a good way to get your feet wet. I answered the call and am hacking JRuby myself, having already submitted a couple of patches. Perhaps this was the reason for which I enjoyed the talk the most. I was already familiar with some of the structure and classes in JRuby.
There were 2 more talks about JRuby: The Pleasure and Pain of Migrating to jRuby, by Steven Bristol and Integrating Enterprise Java with JRuby and Rails, Michael Johann. Unfortunately only the first one was a real case experience, where Steven walked through the problems he faced integrating JRuby with an existing java project. Interesting insights.
Michael Johann basically presented a short tutorial on how to integrate rails with EJB3 which, albeit interesting, failed to address issues faced on real life projects, like dependency management. Issues which we have already addressed in a very cool way here and I plan to share it soon. Still deciding how though…
Tomorrow I’ll be once more heading London for this year’s QCon.
As usual, the schedule looks amazing and I’ll try to keep you all posted about what’s going on there.
Oh and if any of you guys is going and wanna meet up for a geek talk and a couple of beers, just send me a message.
Cheers!
I’m back in Madrid again after the RailsConf and I think it’s time to say something about it.
First off, the infrastructure provided by the conference was really great. The rooms, WiFi connection, food…Â Really well organized.
Now to the sessions, highlights:
Tutorials (Tuesday)
- Meta-programming Ruby for fun and profit (Neal Ford, Patrick Farley)
The old and good techniques that made Ruby so powerful. Here Neal and Patrick walked us through the main tricks to meta programming like open classes - and conditionally open them - , dynamically define methods, sending messages to objects and how Ruby can help test your Java code in a much easier way.
I’ve put the link to the slides but honestly I don’t think they’re too much useful without the talking.
Sessions (Wednessday)
- EC2, MapReduce and Distributed processing (Jonathan Dahl)
Jonathan explained the theory behind MapReduce using very simple ruby examples, providing the basics on how to distribute and paralelize tasks accross multiple machines.
He also introduced Hadoop, a platform built in Java that “lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data”. What I liked the most was the simplicity he explained this subject. As of today, his presentation is not available online. Stay tuned as I’m gonna update this post with the links, as soon as they’re available.
Sessions (Thursday)
- Debugging & Testing the Web Tier (Neal Ford)
If you’ve been concerned about testing your app’s web tier lately, this presentation would probably not show you anything new. Neal talks about the need to debug and test javascript behaviour accross multiple browsers, using tools like Firebug, JSUnit and Selenium. If you have no idea about what these tools are, please stop now and go evaluate them!
We are pretty concerned about testing on my actual job, but selenium tests can be a pain sometimes - a.k.a extremely slow. And what ends up happening is that they are forgotten. Developers only run the test suite if it’s not painful and it’s lightning fast. Here’s is where the highlight for this session comes: CrossCheck.
The idea is to be able to test your javascript code accross multiple browsers without the need to launch them. In fact, you don’t even need a browser installed. The negative point is that it’s kinda fallen behind because now you can only test older versions of browsers. But since the project is getting a lot of traction, I’m pretty sure this will be solved soon.
Conclusion
My overall impression of the other sessions I attended is that some speakers just didn’t have time to properly prepare themselves, what made me think this years’s RailsConf wasn’t all that I expected.
But I also met interesting people and after all one of the key points in a conference is networking.
Definitely worth it though. And that’s why I took the time to provide this highlights.
c u soon
The title says it already.
On monday I’ll be going to Berlin to attend this year´s RailsConf.
This will be my first one and of course my expectations are pretty high!
As usual, after the conference I’ll try and give a summary of what happened there, providing as much content as I can.
Anyone else’s going???
C u there!
Behold latin american railers!
This year we will have the Rails Summit Latin America on October, 15th and 16th, in São Paulo, Brazil.
It’s by far the biggest Rails event we’ve ever had, including many of the speakers that were present at RailsConf.
Fábio Akita is also one of the speakers and provides more details on his blog.
If you’re a assumed rails geek don’t miss the opportunity to hear from the big names and to know a beautiful country like Brazil.
Oh, btw, if you’re brazilian, like me, you have no excuse to miss this party!
Enjoy!!!
As some of you know I went to the European Ruby Conf in Prague, this year.
The event was awesome and it’s good to know they finally made available the majority of the slides, here.
They also published Matz’s keynote, and more videos from the conference are being edited right now, so stay tuned to their home page!
Enjoy!
Most of last QCon’s presentations are available for download here.
Highlights to Ola Bini’s on JRuby(pdf) and Randy Shoup’s on eBay’s architectural principles(pdf).
And while we’re talking about JRuby, it’s impressive how it’s becoming a recurrent and big subject. Fast. It had its own small space at big event like QCon and in the last Euruko in Prague, we had a presentation by the JRuby Core Developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.
Big companies are sponsoring JRuby’s development indirectly or directly, like Sun. And other big companies are endorsing its production ready state, like Oracle, which has a publicly available website developed with JRuby On Rails.
It’s past the time to give it a serious try…
On friday I’ll be heading Prague for the European RubyConf.
Anyone is going?
Almost 300 attendees already registered for the event. And a few very interesting people will be speaking there like Matz and DHH (this one, through skype).
Besides that, the organization staff is scheduling 2 parties, friday and saturday, for the attendees.
Networking comes to mind, doesn’t it? I think it will be a great opportunity to meet interesting and bright people.
So, see u in Prague!
