Marko Anastasov wrote this on June 3, 2011
Notes from Euruko 2011 day 2
We woke up at 10am and arrived for the third talk of the day.
Kornelius presented the internals of CodeRay, a syntax highlighting library, and what makes it fast. No 1.0 release yet, but we’re hoping that it will eventually replace Pygments in Jekyll and Golum for example.
Karel presented elasticsearch. He says that usually we just plug in some “magic” when we need full text search in our apps, that search APIs are usually poor and that as a result the results are not that good. He studied some indexing and feature reduction theory (recommends this textbook) and found great power being untapped. Elasticsearch is supposed to be the solution that merges easy of use while giving true search power and that can be distributed. Check out the website, the docs are looking good.
Pat talked about his adventures in the cloud (Amazon sent him a $80 invoice for RDS powering his blog) and Flying Sphinx, a Heroku add-on for Thinking Sphinx. We were a little bit worried about many communication arrows and ssh tunnelling in the diagrams. We’ll probably try it in practice some day.
Bodo showed us Arduino, a DIY hardware platform. He planted seeds in our heads to make a big red button for deploying apps or ordering lunch. Many projects can be found on Fritzing and his related bookmarks are here.
Ben and Ben gave an overview of Adhearsion, a telephony framework. They built a Rails app in the lobby which let them make a conference call with a guy in the audience.
Mateusz gave a high-level overview of the segment of machine learning that can be used for sentiment analysis (tweets being a data source). Essentially it’s a classification task, and he recommends ankusa and eluka. Btw Datasift is a real-time data reseller.
Jose showed us what he learned about implementing a programming language (lexers, parsers, syntax trees) through his Elixir project. His proposals to extend Ruby with some new syntax reminded us of some features of Haskell. The point is, get out of your comfort zone and try new things, so that you can learn more about the things you already know. It’s great that we have such minded people in our community.
During the lightning talks, we saw Koala, a new Facebook library, laut.fm, Jinkies, middleware API on top of Jenkins for GitHub, codewithme.org, and someone from tretton37 reiterated what BDD is about (we wanted to buy him a beer, but he had to rush back home right after the talk).
