MetroStar Systems Sponsors RubyNation

MetroStar Systems, a 10-year-old Information Technology Provider and one of Inc's "America's Fastest Growing Companies," has agreed to be a Diamond sponsor for RubyNation 2010, which will be held April 9 - 10. MetroStar is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, and specializes in systems and software integration for government clients. It provides clients with agile, collaborative solutions designed to integrate people, processes, technology and learning across an organization.

RubyNation 2010 Interviews
I was in the studio at Arlington Independent Media a few weeks ago taping some interviews for the upcoming documentary, "The Road to RubyNation: The Making of a Conference." Here's a teaser picture of me interviewing Gray Herter, Chief Organizer of the RubyNation Conference. The shot was taken from the studio control room, so Camera #1 (of 3) can be seen in the background on the left.

ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest Site
The ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest site was launched on November 17, 2009. Here's a sceenshot of the web site, which looks pretty cool now that the community has uploaded a bunch of videos.

The purpose of the contest is to help drive up the membership for the Department of State's ExchangesConnect social network, which is focused on promoting cross-cultural understanding around the world. The social network and the contest have been done for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Check out the contest now! There's plenty of room for more participants.

Videotaping RubyNation 2010
I'm one of the founders of the annual RubyNation technical conference, which will be held for the third time on April 8 - 10, 2010. Each year that we've held the conference, we've tried to up the ante in producing a bigger, better conference.

One of the exciting developments for RubyNation 2010 is that we're planning to videotape the conference sessions this year. More than that, we're going to produce a documentary about what it takes to organize and run a conference. I will be functioning as the producer for this documentary, which currently has a working title of "The Road to RubyNation: The Making of a Conference". When completed, this documentary will be shown on public television and will be streamed online.

Ruby Magic, Compliments of Animoto.com 
Here's a short video called "Ruby Magic" that Johnny Nguyen put together to highlight the Ruby development team (me, Dave McVicar and Kelly Gifford) for MetroStar System's New Media Group.


Built using Animoto.com, a new site that focuses on automatically creating killer videos from uploaded image sets.

David Keener at RubyNation 2009
Many thanks to Dave Bock and Don Anderson, who snapped some excellent photos of me speaking at the RubyNation 2009 Conference on June 12th. Click here to see the full set of photos from my talk.

RubyNation 2009 Design Preview
RubyNation 2009 is just around the corner, and I've been working diligently with Don Anderson, graphic artist extraordinaire, to come up with a suitable design for this year's conference hand-outs, such as the T-shirts and badges. So here's a preview of the design we came up with.

Some HTML IS All Right 
User-entered HTML is always problematic for web projects. You'd like your site to have social features that allow users to enter content that will eventually appear online in a nice format, and HTML is a natural fit for formatting. On the other hand, the full complement of HTML tags puts a little too much power in the hands of certain users who might not have your best interests at heart. This external article that I found provides a simple solution for allowing users to enter a limited subset of tags within their content.

David Keener at RubyNation 2008
Many thanks to Gray Herter, who snapped some nice photos of me speaking at the RubyNation 2008 Conference in August. Click here to see the full set of photos from my talk.

Introduction to RubyGems
RubyGems is a package manager for Ruby code, where each package is referred to as a "gem." All of the Ruby books show users how to install gems, but almost nobody explains how to use the many other features of RubyGems.

Graphic Designs for a Regional Ruby Conference
The Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group is planning to organize a new regional Ruby conference. They've asked for some ideas on graphic designs to promote this new conference. So here are some promotional concepts that I've come up with.

JRuby Speed Test
JRuby is an implementation of Ruby in Java. It's come a long way in the last two years, going from pipe dream to viable platform. In the latest speed tests, JRuby has proven to be even faster than the C-based Ruby implementation.