I’m back from attending the excellent Scottish Ruby Conference 2010, held at the National Institute of Physicians in Edinburgh. This was the 2nd conference which @newbamboo had been to (the first under the name “Scotland on Rails”), and my first. It was also the first time I had visited Edinburgh.
The first thing that strikes you about Edinburgh is the architecture. It is remarkable to see so many old buildings, so well layed out across the hilly terrain of the city. It is a shining example of design that stands the test of time.
The conference began with Jim Weirich, and in time-honoured fashion I missed it, having not slept well the night before; it turns out there was an open window in the hotel room, disturbing my sleep the night before. I turned up and managed to watch a presentation by @josephwilk on cucumber, as well as a good introduction to a rubygem called Harmony. He showed us an example where he could run javascript to manipulate the DOM, and the gem would be able to display the changes to the DOM. Very useful.
I then watched talks on using Ruby-Processing to manipulate webcam feeds, then a talk on AREL, the Relational Algebra library used in Rails 3, then lunch, then a talk by @wbruce on Rack middlewares, followed by a cool demo by one of the guys at Scribd.com on distributed architecture, involving a demo that involved us acting as nodes to serve content for a page running from his local machine, and what would happen if those nodes went down. This was very interesting, but seeing more examples of the code behind this would have been nice.
Towards the end of the day I met up with some old colleagues at Naked, @jlsync and @tomtt and proceeded to the nearest pub, meeting up with some local ruby devs (@_Spakman), We chewed over the day’s events, and then proceeded back to the conference for the evening’s lightening talks.
The lightening talks revealed some interesting bits, from Daniel Lucraft’s RedCar IDE, built in Ruby, to Scott Schacon’s showoff presentation software, with a good touch of humour. Fellow bambino @bartoszblimke recycled his presentation on his WebMock gem, and then we watched what I could only describe as the ruby geek’s equivalent of the vagina monologues.
The next day, once again, I took my time to get to the venue (even though I was staying in the Ramada Jarvis just 5 minutes away), and managed to catch the last 5 minutes of the keynote by Tim Bray. Then it was time to see fellow bambinos’ @makoto_inoue and @mloughran talk on RealTimeWeb. The talk went down a treat, especially as we got to handout branded mints to celebrate the launch of the company’s latest product, Pusher.
The next talk in the big theatre was yet another bambinos talk, this time by @gwynmorfey and @bartoszblimke, on the subject of writing bad code. It was a thoroughly entertaining talk, but I wasn’t so sure what lessons I should take away from it. Next was @aq’s talk on Javascript for Rubyists. Aaron had the misfortune of leaving echofon running during the presentation, so I punked him with a tweet saying “HI MOM!”.
Next up was lunch, then I watched @elise_huard’s talk on 12 hours to rate a rails application, which introduced some ruby code metrics tools that had me and @gwynmorfey talking about cool ideas. After that, a talk about genetic algorithms in Ruby, by @railshoster. His topic seemed interesting, and then took a darkly-comic turn with his references to “valid individuals”, and his remarking on the irony of a German discussing such eugenic-related topics. That was not the only joke he told during the conference, and when it came to demo the code in practise, he showed a very cool solution to the travelling salesman problem, using genetic algorithms to plot the most efficient solution to travelling between 20 cities in Germany, whilst ending at the same city as the journey started from.
After that, there was the final keynote, followed by the evening do, where the attendees got to watch ceilidh dancers, a bagpipe player, and some auld warriors in the great hall of the national institute. All in all, a great conference, and one I certainly hope to be back for next year.
