litany against fear

5 Great Talks Notes

Part of my series of notes from the Professional Ruby Conference. See them all here.

This is a talk about talks from Matt Knox (filling in for Giles Bowkett, who didn’t show)

Matt had a bit of a different start with Ruby…he learned Rails for a job. Head down coding, didn’t get involved with the community at all. Eventually he got burned out on it, and he started to get involved and going to conferences.

1) Avi Bryant: Smalltalk is awesome, Maglev is gonna rock. The language itself is strange, but is veyr powerful. Maglev is crazy, alien technology. Been working on it forever.

2) Luke Francl: Testing is overrated. Huge norm violation. Amazing that someone has the courage to do this. He was showing that there are many other ways to increase code quality: proofs, reviews, and more. Unit testing works well though.

3) Damien Katz: Hugely inspirational talk. He sold his house, moved down to NC to write software he was passionate about. He’s now writing CouchDB and it’s part of the Apache project.

4) DHH: Talked about how RailsConf moved from 30 people meeting after RubyConf to a huge conference. He talked about how Ruby isn’t on the fringe anymore. This is the “great surplus” speech, and it will end at some point. The mainstream will copy Rails, something new will come along, or Rails will become the mainstream. What should we do about this? Do OTHER stuff than programming. Read paper (books!). Program less. Get a hobby. Work 4 days/week.

5) Giles Bowkett: Utterly ridiculous. It was about patronage in Renaissance Europe and how it draws parallels to VC now. What happened was that the artists were worn as fashion accessories that were funded by the rich. As you make money you can go from being a pet monkey to being your own monkey owner! Since it’s cheap to develop apps now, VCs aren’t necessary.