Day 2 of the Mountain West Ruby Conference has come and gone. Overall attendance was a bit weak. It seems like half the crowd decided that while it was great to attend a conference on a Friday, they weren’t about to give up their Saturday. To bad for them as this day’s talks were in my opinion much better then the previous. Nothing against the talks on day 1, everyone did a great job, the majority of them were just covering technical areas that I’m not all that interested in.

The day started with a talk from John Lam about his RubyCLR project. John is a brilliant developer who created a project which allows you to bridge between .Net and Ruby thus allowing you to write desktop applications in .Net which use Ruby code for the backend. (Geek translation, he kicks ass!) Due to all the buzz that dynamic languages have been getting, Microsoft saw the value in John’s work and hired him to work on this full time around 6 months ago. Since then he has been pretty quite, and even during his talk wasn’t really able to show off anything new that he’s been working on since starting at Microsoft. He did however hint at some pretty cool things and told us to keep our eyes on what comes out of the MIX conference this summer.

Following John was a very entertaining talk by Michael Hewner on how to interact with USB devices using Ruby. While I was a bit disappointed that we weren’t able to see a live demo, as Michael decided to use a Windows laptop for fear that his linux box wouldn’t work on the projector, Michael was very funny and made what could have been a boring talk on device drivers quite entertaining.

Due to catching a nasty illness Kirk Haines, who was suppose to present on something called IOWA, had to cancel. Fortunetly for us Jamis Buck and Marcel Molina stepped up at the last minute to do a live Rails Way refactoring session. This was probably my favorite talk of the whole conference (topping Chad’s keynote from the day before). I’m a huge fan of Jamis and Marcel and it was great to hear their thoughts on how things should be refactored as they “Strived for Symbolics”.

The final talk of the day was given by the JRuby guys. I have to say that I was a little disappointed at this talk. They spent what seemed like 30-40 minutes showing slides of statistics and talking about the VM, then spent what little time was remaining showing code. Now don’t get me wrong, Tom and Charles are great guys doing amazing things, and as a former Java guy I get that the VM kicks ass. I would have just rather seen more code, and less marketing material.

When the talks were over we headed over to Stoneground to grab a sandwich and a beer (yes you can find beer in SLC, I was surprised too!). Afterwards we headed back to the library and Matt and I spent the rest of the afternoon hacking on our RSpec plugin which I hope to release tomorrow morning. Afterwards we then headed back to the hotel for a bit, then grabbed a few of the remaining attendees and had a great dinner at a microbrewery down the street from the hotel. The rest of the evening was then spent hacking on code in the hotel lobby pub. Not your typical St. Pattys day event, but we had a great time!

Overall this was a great event, and definitely a nice warm-up for RailsConf this May. My excitement about the community has been re-energized and I’m looking forward to putting into practice many of the things I learned. As I mentioned previously, the organizers did a great job making sure everything was taken care of. They, as well as all of the great presenters, have my thanks!

Day 1 of the Mountain West Ruby Conference is slowly winding down. Overall I’m happy with how things are turning out. From the coffee/juice in the morning, to the power-strips and ethernet cables (wireless sucks at conferences), the organizers have been on top of things and are making sure everyone is having a great time.

While it was great to cheer on James as he gave his well delivered talk, as well as Jade as he stepped up and gave an impromptu lightening talk, I don’t tend to come to these events for the presentations, but more for the hallway conversations, which have been great. I got to enjoy a great lunch with Tim, as well as many great conversations due to the small, intimate nature of this conference.

As far as the talks go, my favorite so far was they keynote by Chad Fowler. I read Chad’s book, “My Job Went to India”, when it first came out and was very inspired. His talk followed along a similar track and was equally as good. One of his biggest points is that technology comes and goes, and while we may be the pioneers of today we will easily become the dinosaurs of tomorrow unless we’re constantly challenging ourselves and searching for the next new technology.

The talk tonight, like the book, made me take a step back and re-evaluate my career and the direction I’m heading. While I love programming in Rails, I need to be very careful about getting to comfortable and allowing myself to be pigeon holed as “that rails guy”. As the Pragmatic Programmer suggests, you should be learning a new language once a year, but yet I have failed to do so in the most recent years. When I get home I’m going to spend some time evaluating the latest technology, and start committing to learning something new.

Tomorrow looks to be another great day with talks by the JRuby guys, John Lam and many others!

After a bit of a slow start we’ve arrived in SLC!

A few of us are attempting to head to Salt Lake City for the Mountain West Ruby Conference. Unfortunately after 30 minutes of sitting on the plane they kicked us off due to a problem with a fuel pump. Just as we sat down for a quick drink/pretzel they tell us that we need to high-tail it to the other terminal as they’ve found us a new plane.

Having to run from terminal to terminal is not really what I’d consider fun. However we’re definitely lucky that they found us a new plane as they were estimating that it was going to be 2-3 hours to fix the problem.

Boarding now, heres hoping that there are no additional problems. See you in Salt Lake!