Mountain West Ruby Conf last week rocked. It was well organized as always–props to Mike Moore(@blowmage) for putting it together and Confreaks for recording it and all the other people who made it the awesome conf that I like coming to every year(e.g. Jeremy Nicoll-Smashing Photographer).
CHE-UP my friends.
More seriously, Zed’s talk made me think more carefully about my open source contributions in terms of who benefits from my work. Am I just a sucker for working on stuff like Dubious or am I just doing it because I find it interesting and engaging. I think he crafted a really good talk and a good meme(CHE-UP) and made a good point about being aware of the motivations behind projects you contribute to. Now I just need to find some suckers/contributors to help me with my plans for world domination ;).
Mind Monkey Patching
David Brady’s talk about head hacking reminded me that I need to finish Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, a good book I’ve been reading off and on for more than 6 months now. I need to try using that crazy cat picture (the one with too many eyes) to trigger hardware interrupts at interesting times. Might be fun.
“Web” Development
Wayne Seguin’s talk was very topical as MWRC is my favorite conference to meet new and interesting Rubyists. I feel like I did some definite “web” development while I was there. I met new people and spent more time getting to know better some of the people in the community I’d met at other conferences.
I came away from the talk feeling inspired to do more looking at teaching and mentoring, something I looked at a little at RubyConf.
Concurrency
Concurrency was a big theme at the conference with Ilya Grigorick talking about more advanced concurrency models, and Preston Lee presenting about using the GPU and CUDA to solve embarrassingly parallel problems.
Ilya talked about the Actor model, which Erlang uses as well as Pi-Calculus/CSP which is what Go uses. Both deal with concurrency by providing constraints on what you can do within them. Interestingly, their constraints are very similar, but have different abstractions with regard to what is named.
In the Actor model,
- Name every process
- Every process has a mailbox
- Communicate via messages
In the CSP,
- Processes are anonymous
- Every channel has a name
- Processes communicate over channels
He wrote a gem that acts like CSP called agent
5K
I ran in the 5k. I slept through it last year and decided that I had to do it this year. There were 13 of us. It was very dramatic.
Rounding the last corner (pic by smashingshots.com)
I think I was last.
Mirah & Dubious
Mirah and Dubious were represented. I did a lightning talk on Dubious Thursday and Joe O’Brien showed off what is going on with Pindah as part of his Ruby on Android talk. I got to introduce a few people to Mirah and Dubious which was pretty cool. It seems like people are getting more interested in Mirah and projects written in it, which I think is pretty awesome.
Some other thoughts
Redis is a pretty cool project that I’d like to look at more than I have.
Wood cuts make for nifty slides.
Figs are killer.
Thanks again everybody for a great conference.