MagicRuby Roundup

Last week, I attended the MagicRuby conference in Orlando.  Aside from all the content in the talks, I learned three important things:

1. Rubyists are always trying something new and interesting.
2. Disney World is a great place to hold a conference.
3. Orlando has a fun and enthusiastic Ruby community!

I saw a lot of great talks at this conference.  I'm attempting to condense 30+ pages of notes into only the most important information.  I'll tell you (a) where to find slides/video, (b) who I think should check out each talk, and (c) what I think the most important points are.

This doesn't include every talk, but it includes most of them.

----------

Cultivating Cucumber  (Slides)
Les Hill, Hashrocket

Who should check it out?

• Developers interested in improving TDD and BDD practices.  
• Developers unsure of whether to use Cucumber.

Short take:

• Great summary of the features of cucumber:  Hooks, tags, steps, and more!
• Good explanation of Cucmber's strengths (like the use of natural langage) and its weaknesses (like the need to maintain all those regexes)
• Good discussion of best practices for organizing and refactoring cucumber suites.
• I wish there was more discussion about the types of projects where cucumber is most useful.

----------

Geospacing Your Ruby (Slides)
Peter Jackson, Intridea

Who should check it out?

• Developers of spatially-enabled apps
• Developers working in government, urban planning or environmental modeling.
• Database Administrators (for those of you in the enterprise)
• Geography/map buffs.

Short take:

• Great overview of spatial terms, geometry, map types, etc.
• Great overview of existing database and front-end tools for spatially-enabled apps.
• Good suggestions for interesting spatial data to model and useful ways of displaying it.

----------

Loving your Customers, Loving your Peers (No slides available)
Alan Johnson, Carsonified

Who should check it out?

• Technical people who deal directly with customers
• People who want to improve the reputation of the Ruby community
  

Short take:

• A "feel good" presentation, rife with humorous anecdotes and pop culture references.
• A good reality check for developers who are quickly dismissive of non-ruby technologies, Microsoft, etc.
• Lots of great suggestions on how to treat customers better, how to empathize with customers, and how to enjoy your job more.

----------

Code is not Enough (No slides available)
Gregg Pollack / Caike Souza, EnvyLabs

Who should check it out?

• Entrepreneurs
  
• Freelancers
• Software development shop owners
• Employees of small companies
  

Short take:

• Good commentary on many important engineering management concepts:  Setting expectations, delegating tasks, etc.
• A good discussion on software development as a craft vs an art.
• Good suggestions for developers, like "don't be afraid to ask for help" and advice on how to "get in the zone" while programming.
• Great advice on creating a culture of learning at your organization (especially the "book club" suggestion)
• Good insight into effective networking and "making friends rather than sales"
• Asserted that developing a product for another company is more difficult than developing and launching your own product (I don't necessarily agree)

----------

Exceptional Ruby (Slides and More)
Avdi Grimm

Who should check it out?

• Just about any Ruby developer.

Short take:

• Good review of exception syntax and handling in Ruby.
• Great discussion on when to use exceptions in the first place ("exceptions are for exceptional situations")
• Review of many design techniques for handling and managing exceptions
• Reviewed some common software design pitfalls related to exceptions.

----------

What happened to Desktop Development in Ruby? (blog post)
Andy Maleh, Obtiva

Who should check it out?

• Developers interested in desktop applications
• Developers interested in the current state of desktop application programming in Ruby.
  

Short take:

• Great review of current desktop development frameworks:  shoes, wxWidgets, Limelight, Glimmer
• Excelent insight into what's wrong and what's right with each framework.
• Great perspective on what makes a well-designed desktop app framework.

----------

Keynote (No Slides Available)
Dave Thomas, Pickaxe Author

Who should check it out?

• Dave Thomas fans
• Project managers and developers looking to improve software development methodologies.
  

Short take:

• Great review of what it really means to practice "agile" development.
• Insightful  recursive algorithm for software development:  Where do we want to be?  Where are we now?  How do we improve our position? Repeat. 
• Good use of a one-wheel balancing robot as a metaphor for prioritizing and executing incremental software changes.
• Advocated the "ten second audit" for developers:  Why am I doing this?  Does it have to be done this way?  Does it have to be done at all?
• Insightful, humorous commentary on overzealous cucumber evangelists and constantly-changing tools in the Ruby community. 

----------

Crank up your Apps with Torquebox (Slides and Video)
Jim Crossley, Red Hat

Who should check it out?

• Enterprise developers who want to work with Ruby but must develop in a Java ecosystem
• Developers challenged with building scalable, distributed web applications.
  

Short take:

• Good overview of everything Torquebox:  Configuration, JBoss, messaging, queues, processors, services, scaling techniques, and more.
• Good discussion of use-cases for Torquebox, its performance, and potential future changes.

----------

How I Lerned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud (Slides)
Wesley Beary, Engine Yard

Who should check it out?

• Developers currently using or interested in cloud-based infrastructure.
• Anyone overwhelmed by the choice of cloud providers.
  

Short take:

• Great overview of Fog, a vendor-agnostic cloud interface that works with many popular providers, such as EC2 and Rackspace.
• Discusses many good use-cases for Fog.
• Helpful, tutorial-style explanation of how to use Fog to interface with a cloud provider.

----------

Documentation is Freaking Awesome (Slides and More)
Kyle Neath, Github

Who should check it out?

• Open-source authors.
  
• Any developer who might, at some point in the future, hand off their project to someone else.  :)
  

Short take:

• Very straightforward, "common-sense" talk about why documentation will help your project.
• Discussed many useful ways to improve documentation, covering everything from the README to RDoc to Yard to "Having an awesome web page."

----------

Please let me know if there are any errors, of if you can point me to any slides that are currently missing!