litany against fear

coding with spice ¤ by nick quaranto

Professional Ruby Conference Wrapup

published 20 Nov 2008

If you’re looking for the copious amount of notes I took for the conference, check out this post.

Speakers, if you have slides up, blog posts, or other stuff you want me to link to, let me know and I’ll make sure to add it.

I had a ton of fun at this conference. I was really honored to meet some of the smartest people in the business and really get a feel for the community at large. I think the most interesting part of the conference was the mix of people involved…it felt more like a big usergroup meeting than anything. Some people were very experienced, yet others were just starting to look into Ruby and what it has to offer them. Getting perspectives from both sides of the coin was very enlightening.

The boston.rb pub night/crawl was a great time too. (At least for most people) I definitely want to see the rochester.rb group start up again with focused presentations and I’m going to work towards making that happen. So, what I learned in a much simpler format:

Test all the fucking time. There’s no excuses. Pick a testing framework and go with it.

Ruby is slowly moving into the enterprise, and we have to fight hard to keep it fun and exciting.

Agile development principles are at the core of the Ruby community.

Pair programming helps a lot but is a skill to be learned.

Have fun and be passionate about your work.