This weekend was the inaugural Silicon Valley Ruby Conference organized by SDForum and Ruby Central and the result was good enough that I hope (and expect) that it will become an annual event. Big props to Bill Grosso, David Black and Raya Fowler and putting together a quality event despite scheduling the event only 10 days after the much bigger Canada on Rails conference.
We did get two of the same presenters though: Joe O’Brien, who spoke about the value of creating domain specific languages, and Steven Baker, who discussed his RSpec project implementing behavior-driven development for Ruby. Also on the test front, Ryan Davis discussed his ZenTest suite, which I think will be very useful for me. I really got a lot from Chad Fowler’s presentation on Rails 1.1 (subbing in for Marcel Molina).
Rich Kilmer gave a case study of a very short but interesting contract he did for the US Air Force–who knew moving fighter jets around (off mission) was so difficult? Jason Hoffman, CTO of the company which hosts this fine website, gave a really well-done presentation on the whole concept of scaling for web apps and how Joyent/TextDrive manage it; frankly, though, I was quite surprised that he only got one “when will this be available to TextDrive customers” as I’m sure there were more than just the two of us in the room.
Less good were the sessions by Alex Chafee and David Pollack but the less negative said the better.
Very good overall and, based on the success of this event, SDForum is creating a Ruby SIG; that bodes well for the Rails community here in the Valley.
BillSaysThis 