Mountain West Ruby Conference : day one notes

Tim Connor — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:18:00 -0700

Evan Phoenix opening keynote (how Rubinius is run)

Highlights low barrier of entry for developers as theme

Anti-core/elite group – creates unhealthy environment (reminds me of how getting a patch applied for merb on github was)
Spec suite makes good entryway

Talking about ruby community in general

Niceness
Excitability/early adopterism
again, see slideshow for highlights

How to run community

A little polyanna (I don’t think so, but it got mentioned)?
very gitty bazaar style (gack, typo NOT cathedral)
a lot of subtle “drawing contrasts” with rails

My sorta hippie.

My thoughts on question?: ease of contributing, github as singularity, loved it all, but self-selecting elitism by cutting edgeness, does it scale? How do you keep openeness as project grows – see mailinglist overwhelmed with help vampires after rails got popular. Also see back-channels

A: Roughly: organically. Create the excitement and environment and the pool of people to handle the growth will come online as it grows.

Ezra’s half

Don’t be overly clever. Really most of his talk is about that and being a responsible coder if you are making a library. And a reminder that avoiding premature optimization doesn’t mean avoiding all optimization

Good explanation of event-driven (thin, even mongrel) versus threaded server (mongrel)
Rack sidestepping of framework is sexy
Provides is the best feature, still. Action-args is close. Picking a favorite child.

My thought: what about elegance/clever usages getting mainstreamed into the interpretor. Refactor then, I assume? To simple to bother asking. Mongrel + evented mongrel? A: yes, if needed Magic of action args countered by increasing client-code explicitness

Giles talk

I read enough of it on blogs, and aside from that it’s a little crazy. Giles is quite interesting in person. I think his shown code may be a little unneccessaily “meta.” He’s keeping mum if that is an ironic by intent thing

Wycats:

DM Rocks, that is all. Also awesome transitions in slides.

Didn’t take notes for rest.