The Joe O’Brien and Jim Weirich talk, “The Ruby Insurgency,” is now available on Blip.tv, featuring imaginative skits to show Rubyists the mindset of customers. And, of course, our own Dave Bock makes a special guest appearance in the video. Check it out!
Jeff Casimir’s Educational Talk
I just finished editing and uploading Jeff Casimir’s top-rated education talk, “How to Teach Anything to Anybody, Even Your Dev Team.” The talk is now available online at rubynation.blip.tv. Check it out now!
RubyNation Contest
It looks like RubyNation will be doing an online photo contest using the Votridea Online Contest Platform (which I helped create). I’ll post more news as it becomes available.
Recruiting Rich Kilmer
I’m at RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore, MD. I just recruited Rich Kilmer to be a keynote speaker for RubyNation 2011.
First Three RubyNation Videos
Don Anderson and I have gotten the first batch of RubyNation conference videos live online at rubynation.blip.tv. This includes presentations from Jim Weirich, Nick Gauthier and Kyle Banker.
New Toy: Final Cut Express
My new toy just arrived, compliments of Amazon.com: Final Cut Express. So, I’m now armed and dangerous when it comes to video editing. OK, ok, so it’s not Final Cut Pro, but it’s got a solid subset of features for video editing (and it was MUCH cheaper), and I’m working with two other editors who have Final Cut Pro (so they can do the extra heavy lifting if needed). Onwards to the editing of RubyNation conference content!
RubyNation 2011
We felt that the April timeframe worked out so well for RubyNation 2010 that we’ve already booked the same timeframe for RubyNation 2011. Next year’s conference will be April 8 – 9, 2011, with a separately paid for training day on April 7 for those who are interested.
RubyNation Retrospective 2010
We just had the Retrospective for RubyNation 2010, where all of the organizers get together for a celebratory dinner and discuss 1) what worked well with the conference, and 2) what needs to be improved for next year. I believe this strategy is one of the key reasons that RubyNation has steadily improved as a conference over the past three years.
Anatomy of an April Fools Joke
We moved RubyNation to April this year to avoid conflicting with RailsConf 2010, which was scheduled to be held in nearby Baltimore in June. Once we landed in April, we realized that we were going to have a nice opportunity to pull an April Fool’s joke on the Ruby community.
We struggled long and hard to find a suitable joke to pull. It clearly couldn’t be mean-spirited, tasteless, offensive or just plain stupid. It had to be kind of cool. Many emails were exchanged as we all wracked our brains to come up with a good joke, and there’s more than 10 dedicated organizers for an event like RubyNation.
Finally, Arild Shirazi, from Code Sherpas, came up with the winning idea.
So, here’s the text of the April Fool’s joke that was published on the RubyNation site just 8 days before the conference:
Matz Presents Ruby2 - Finally Ready for the Enterprise in 2010!
Yukihiro Matsumoto (newly minted Chief Ruby Architect at Oracle), will join RubyNation live via satellite from Japan to discuss how Oracle's acquisition of Ruby finally makes our favorite language ready for the enterprise. With the impending release of the Ruby Language Specification 2 version 1.0 and Sun's Ruby Virtual Machine™, Matz will describe how developers and architects can leverage best practices for these upcoming, exciting changes:
Ruby Community Process® Program - controlled
changes to Ruby via Ruby Specification Request®
(RSR) committees
Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition™ -
the reference Rails Application Container®
Introduction of type-safety to the language with
Ruby Generics™
Extensive XML-based configuration and mapping
n-tiered Ruby, hyper-threaded Ruby, Rails
Enterprise Beans®, rant build tool and much,
much more!
Get excited about Ruby2v1.0 - Ready for the Enterprise!
One of the things we weren’t expecting was the active participation of Matz himself, the creator of the Ruby programming language, in our little joke. It seems that various people asked him if he had really joined Oracle. When he found out why people were asking him this, he got such a kick out of it that he re-tweeted it.
This caused a major traffic spike on the RubyNation site, as you can clearly see in the Google Analytics chart below. The chart covers a week and shows the number of visits for each day.
We were all surprised and pleased at how well the April Fool’s joke went over. We’re hoping to do something like this next year, but we’ll have to come up with the right idea. So, see you next April!
MetroStar Ad
Here’s a preview of MetroStar Systems’ full-page advertisement in the RubyNation 2010 Conference Program. I was surprised (and pleased) when the Marketing team incorporated pictures of myself and Dave McVicar into the ad.
