I had been to the Ruby Conf 2013 in Pune on 22nd and 23rd of this month.
Was quite excited to meet the Ruby Gurus like Jim Weirich – the author of “Rake” which is a defacto build tool in the Ruby world. However, I was kind of taken aback by the fact that he was explaining and demonstrating the fundamentals of TDD that too in a Keynote speech.
Aaron Patterson’s Keynote was very very interesting. He had shown his new “gadget” called “Google Glass”. If you want to have a quick look at it, check out here.
Nick Sutterer’s talk stressed upon “NOT to be afraid of creating more classes”. How can you break up your Controller/Model/Views into smaller maintainable classes/views using gems like Cells, Roar, Objectify etc.
There was a lot of motivation from the speakers to the audience requesting to contribute to the Open Source world. Richard Schneeman has developed a site called CodeTriage which allows us to signup for various open source softwares, following which you would be sent a bug/issue every day. You can contribute by simply reproducing an issue, fix an issue and even provide pull request to the developers. This can provide a good start for anyone who would like to get their hands on the Open Source. I have immediately signed up with Code Triage and have already started working on my first Rails bug.
Lightning Talks
In this section, the participants were given an opportunity to volunteer themselves to present a talk for about 5 minutes on any subject.
Myself and my friend Venkat had an opportunity presented a talk on “Developing Rich Internet Applications with Netzke framework (ExtJS and Rails)”.
Generally, such conferences would cover some fundamental/basic topics and some advanced topics running in parallell in two tracks. However, in this conference, the focus was more towards the crowd who have just started in Ruby and had very little as takeaway for people looking forward for advanced topics.
Blogging my thoughts 