Marko Anastasov wrote this on June 1, 2011
Notes from Euruko 2011 day 1
While we surely found Euruko a nice experience, it seems that the conference had too many attendees. Most of the people seemed to group by company or origin, and it was harder to get in touch with different people randomly, unlike Ruby And Rails in Amsterdam for instance, where a sense of togetherness is very strong.
There were a couple of talks that in our opinion lacked substance and/or were poorly presented. Also having to wander around an abandonded area in dark for an hour in order to get to a party is a bit of a fail. Fortunately we were accompanied by a local, named something like Shawn, who could talk to the silhouettes. Here’s hope that the last Euruko ever will be better in those regards.
Notes
Matz gave the first talk at the conference. He explained why he had to work to submit Ruby to JIS and ISO standardization, and Rite, a subset of Ruby which targets embedded devices, such as digital TVs. When we recall what development on such platforms looked like back in our student intern days, we wish him all the success in the world. Oh and the plan is to persuade vendors to use Rite for scripting large applications.
Julik works in the video editing industry in a company that lets him open source various domain-specific tools called Guerilla DI. He gave us a hint about the amount of data they’re dealing with (terabytes) and some tips of promoting open source projects (“use the most hardcore mailing list / forum”). He recommends delegate.rb.
The JRuby talk was aimed at people who would contribute to JRuby. There was Java on the screen.
Lourens of Wildfire was very hardcore and explained the internals of EventMachine, talked about the Reactor pattern and the difference and limitations of synchronous, asynchronous and event-driven models.
Jesper of Wooga shared a lot of valuable experiences about cloud vs dedicated, MySQL+Redis vs just Redis and the production-level details of all. For example, bare metal is cheaper and a dedicated network layer matters a lot, but of course you can’t beat cloud if you don’t know your load and need to scale up or down. They found the “diskstore” feature of Redis best suited, with ability to periodically save in the background. Slides are here.
Nick presented his gem Roar which helps in making REST representatives and hypermedia(!) systems. It all started with the goal of decoupling complex applications.
Elise gave a talk on concurrency. She presented capabilities of other languages (like Erlang) through short examples, pointed out Ruby attempts in concurrent, revactor and celluloid. But it all boils down to the GIL.
Federico talked about traits as a solution to the Expression problem. We’re not sure if we ever encountered it.
Paolo, a born stage man it seems, gave an engaging presentation of possible pitfalls of methodmissing. He wrote Metaprogramming Ruby, and when he talks about things like redefining respondto? and undefining all Object’s methods, it is actually not difficult to follow. Slides here.
Finally Sven presented Travis during the lightning talks. The idea of Travis is to provide a build platform for Ruby open-source projects.
