07 Jun 2008 - Warsaw
First week of june seems like a perfect time to write about EuRuKo, a conference held at the end of march. Well, sarcasm aside – starting a company/group technical blog (and by starting I mean “populating with content”) isn’t the easiest thing we’ve been doing.
Disclaimer: this one is written by me (Tomash) and presents only my personal perspective. I’m trying to talk other guys into writing their own impressions.
Enough babbling, time to start with the report.
Saturday.
It was a good morning. Well, a decent at least, considering some partying after reaching Prague on friday. After breakfast, registration and letting our girlfriends visit Prague on their own we were ready for our first Ruby conference. As we all know from EuRuKo Program, it all started with Matz.
10.00: Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto – “Keynote”. This one was great, definitely one of the best talks during this Euruko. Not (only) because it was Matz who gave it, but mostly because it perfectly balanced some technical details and jokes. Matz turned out to be a pretty good English speaker (definitely better that what I’d expect from Japanese), at least comparing to Koichi that was about to follow…
11.00: Koichi Sasada – “Ruby meets VM”. Now, Koichi is a great man and he deserves a lot of respect for task as daunting as writing VM for Ruby. His talk was great from a technical point of view. At least from what I understood. And there we are, at the weakest point of his talk—some slides were in japanese and Koichi is simply… well, let’s say that he’s definitely better at Ruby than speaking english ;)
Because we actually knew JRuby, we’ve decided to have a walk through Prague Old City (it’s beautiful) and try some more of famous Czech beer. Being Polish we’re actually a bit picky about beer from other countries, but the beer we drank in Prague was – regardless of brand – just great and, I dare say that, even better than beer in Poland.
After getting back and having some great lunch at the conference we were prepared for next set of talks.
14.30: David A. Black – “Per-Object Behavior in Ruby”. Definitely the most enlightening talk amongst the ones I’ve listened to. Writing more about it would be a waste of time, just grab the video and watch it. Made me a better Ruby programmer.
15.15: Nic Williams – “Meta-Meta-Programming with Ruby”. I was disappointed. If I had to give it “the most” title, it would be “the most disappointing talk”. Dr Nic is a well-known man in Ruby and Rails community, and – to say the least without writing pages about great things he’s done – he definitely deserves his fame and thus I was looking forward to listening to a talk by someone of such format. But, as I wrote earlier, I was disappointed. Dr Nic put too much weight on making his talk easy, witty and full of jokes and, well, hasn’t put a lot of technical knowledge into his talk. Sure, it was a bit philosophical, but definitely not worth 45 minutes of Ruby conference.
After spending some time on Lightning Talks (few were great, few weren’t) we’ve decided to get some more of Prague’s views and beer (I also had to give my talk a few finishing touches and some polish), and thus left Euruko until sunday.