eRubyCon Recap

What a fantastic conference this was two weeks ago. A great lineup of speakers, and fantastic after event gatherings. And I missed the first day! Josh Holmes has a great series of posts detailing the event, so I won’t repeat the play by play here. But I can say that I will definitely be making the trip to Columbus for eRubyCon 2009.

This was the first conference I have gone to where I actually presented. My talk was originally geared more towards .NET developers interested in Ruby, thinking that there would be more Java and .NET enterprise folks there then it turned out. After I arrived, as I listened to the attendees, I realized the audience was primarily people already doing Ruby. I also noticed a certain level of distrust around Microsoft in general, even though the event was hosted in their office! As I was going to be speaking on IronRuby, a Microsoft project, this concerned me a bit. So I ended up putting in an opening section about some of, what I believe to be, the positive changes at Microsoft over the last half-decade or so. I highlighted efforts like CodePlex and Port25. A number of people seemed to copy down the Port25 address, so I hope I helped open some eyes in this case. I also went over the current state of IronRuby, and compared it’s performance to JRuby. I then asked who did .NET work in their day to day jobs and must have had about 5 people raise their hands. Then I went through a short demo of opening up and changing a standard WinForms app using IronRuby. It seemed to go well, I’ve gotten positive feedback on it and a number of suggestions for improvement.

I can’t thank Joe O’Brien enough for the opportunity or confidence in me he showed by allowing me to speak. The slides and demo used for my presentation are here.