dave astels

I’m sitting in the airport in Charlotte, on my way home from RubyConf2007.

What a fabulous conference. This the most enjoyable conference I’ve been to in a very long time.

There was so many great talks/ideas/projects, it’s hard to pick highpoints, but these stand out for me (in no particular order):

• drnic for some very cool tech and sheer entertainment value.
• Laurent Sansonetti for a jaw-dropping talk/demo about what’s possible with the latest Ruby love from Apple.
• Charlie & Tom on JRuby
• Evan on Rubinius… that is one cool project… sign me up
• and, of course, Matz’s keynote

It’s no wonder the Ruby community is “nice people” when we have someone like Matz at the head of it.

Maybe as rewarding, or even more, than the tech & talks was seeing old friends again and meeting others face to face that to date I’d only known online.

It was an awesome weekend, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the next Ruby conference!

Good words about rSpec.

On Ruby: RubyConf*MI Wrap Up:

“On Ruby

Saturday, August 26, 2006

RubyConf*MI Wrap Up

…

I also thought Craig Damyanovich did a great job (especially as a first time presenter. As a nod to his love of hockey, he covered BDD and RSpec in a ‘three period’ format (only in Michigan). Craig was really laid back and seemed completely calm all through his presentation. I know I didn’t “

(Via Pat Eyler’s blog.)

Canada on Rails (including yours truly) got mention on the Linux Journal site.

Obie Fernandez did an installment of the Rails Podcast at Canada on Rails last week that has just hit the ‘net. The feature guest is Tim Bray (one of the fathers of XML), they discuss (among several other things) my CoR talk, BDD, and RSpec before Obie flags me down and pulls me in as well.

Oopps! We were making a point of getting to Thomas’ talk this morning… assuming (without double checking the program) that it started at 9 like yesterday. Oops. Today started at 8. I don’t get to work that early! I’ve barely had coffee by that time of day. Drat & bother. I really wanted to see that talk (on Ajax & Rails). At least I have the consolation of being able to watch it on the DVD.

Steve Baker and I were interviewed by Obie Fernandez for “coming soon” InfoQ for which Obie is the Ruby Community editor. Apparently the interview will be on the conference DVD as well.

I had my talk earlier this afternoon. It went down pretty well. People were interested and apparently it got people talking. Cool. Steve Baker followed it with a talk on using TDD for Rails development which had some good information in it and seemed to be well received as well.

Kyle presented RadRails… a Rails development environment built on top of Eclipse. Very cool. Suffice it to say I need to play with this.

I’m writing this en-route from Montreal to Vancouver. Nancy & I scored a couple of awesome seats: Row 25 on an Air Canada Airbus 321.. exit row… with a full missing row ahead of us… and the 3 seats to ourselves. So we’re hacking our way across Canada.

We (Nancy & I) fly to Vancouver this afternoon for the first Canada On Rails conference. It’s going to be fun. It’s my first keynote and the big public unveiling of the new, improved rSpec.