If you were considering signing up for the regional Ruby conference in North Carolina, the Ruby Hoedown, you'd better move quick. This is the mail I received this evening.
The Ruby Hoedown is less than two weeks away, and we couldn't be
more excited about it! A top-notch charity workshop, a line up of
seven great talks, lots of hallway time for meeting fellow
Rubyists, and some really sweet t-shirts add up to a great,
Southern-style conference. What, you're not registered yet? Well,
it so happens we have a few seats left, so proceed to
http://rubyhoedown.com/ post-haste and grab yours before we sell
out! And, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to
send them to organizers AT rubyhoedown.com - we're glad to help out
however we can.
See ya'll real soon now,
The Ruby Hoedown Organizers
This conference will have some great speakers (including me!) and a great crowd. Our local Ruby crowd has a lot of very talented software folk. Although the Hoedown is the first of it's type we've had here in Raleigh, I know several of the speakers and the organizers. I expect it to be top notch, so come out and join us!
If you've never caught a BarCamp before, I'd encourage to try to make it to your local edition. Or start one if you don't have one already locally.
Last year it was a great event on several fronts. I learned a bit about several topics and met a lot of great people. The professional networking alone was worth attending, but it was also a lot of fun.
This year's RDU BarCamp is coming up shortly (August 7th), but I won't be able to make this one. But check it out if you have the time. I think you'll find it's well worth the trip.
BarCamp RDU.
I just read another classic post by Martin Fowler. Among other things, he's pointing out the distinction between when it's appropriate to go learn a new language and when you should re-use the one you already know... and there's a bit of why people like Ruby as well.
Should we strive to only have one language in our development efforts?
A few gems from the posting:
...many frameworks resort to configuration files, which are effectively external DomainSpecificLanguages written in XML - which adds a jigger of 80 proof ugliness to them...
For many developers, the one-language notion is a sign of lack of professionalism....
Time and time again I hear experienced Java and C# developers report they are more effective in Ruby - which is why I've been encouraging Ruby. It wouldn't surprise me if similar reports appear in the next few years about other languages too...
Enjoy!
My blog entry on my OSCON talk had a spike in visitors, so I looked at my logs and found this:
http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/20070711.html
Cool.
I've changed the slides enough that I wanted to be sure everyone who wanted them could get the latest version. I normally go for a lightweight, zen-esque approach in my slides, so that unless you come to the talk, you can't just read the slides and get the good stuff. But if you've heard the talk, the slides make great sense.
For this talk, I went the other way... everything is in the slides... I'll try to do an HTML export of them if anyone wants one, but here's the Power Point file.
Use C to Tune Your Rails Application
It's very much an introductory talk, so if you're looking for advanced content, I'd suggest you go straight to the Older, free version of the Pickaxe book, buy the Pickaxe, second edition, and visit How to Profile Your Rails Application and Make Rails Go Vroom!.
