RubyNation 2011: A Great Success

RubyNation 2011 is now in the history books. I have to say that it was another highly successful and inspiring conference, with dozens of talks by some of the field’s top Rubyists. We had 216 attendees this year, up from last year’s 185. Plus, I’ll treasure my pirate hat forever (speaker Chris Williams handed out pirate hats to go with his pirate-themed talk).

General Dynamics

I just started my new job at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems yesterday, after a relaxing 2-week vacation. Looking forward to doing some cutting edge Rails work…

Excellent Cucumber Resource

David de Florinier and Gojko Adzic have done a great service by providing a free online book about Cucumber, a tool for Behavior Driven Development (BDD) that has become widely used in the Ruby, Java and .NET comunities. It’s available in PDF form, or can be read online. Check it out today!

Note: (2017/08/24) The link has been removed because it’s no longer active. Apparently, it now points to a dating web site of some sort.

RubyNation 2011 is Sold Out!

It’s official. RubyNation 2011 is sold out. This year’s conference will have 200 attendees, our best total ever. If you’re interested, get yourself on the waiting list. If anybody cancels, you might still have a chance to get a ticket.

Reading “Eloquent Ruby”

I’m currently reading Russ Olsen’s new technical book, “Eloquent Ruby.” It’s an excellent book. I particularly like its focus on what it takes to be a truly good Ruby developer, rather than just teaching Ruby syntax. It’s a great “next book” for the developer that has learned Ruby, and now wants to learn how to use it properly and effectively.

Designing a Card Game

Several recent conferences have used custom card games to get attendees to interact with each other (though the rules were rather deficient). Here’s a nice overview article on how to design a card game.

Note: The link has been removed because it now goes to a site about online gambling.

RubyNation Speaker Selection

The Call for Papers for RubyNation closed Sunday, January 31st. The conference organizers met last night and finalized the speaker selections. We’ll be posting individual speaker announcements as we get confirmations from each speaker. We’ll have the full schedule on RubyNation as soon as we can get all speakers confirmed.

DevIgnition Bumper

I just got an awesome DevIgnition bumper, an animated introduction culminating in the DevIgnition logo, from Don Anderson. Now that I’ve got this, I can start getting the DevIgnition conference videos completed. Expect some nice online technical videos shortly.