The Golden Gate Ruby Conference was one of the best technical conferences I’ve attended. In addition to my links (below), you can look at pivotallabs live blogging and justin.tv videos. Justin.tv, which has a Ruby-powered website, provided full coverage, and videos will be posted on the pivotal labs website.
I really liked the format and venue. The Sweedish American hall was rustic, in stark contrast to its central location on Market street with easy access to public transit. It is located right above Cafe du Nord where I used to hear Charles Brown play. The physical setup of the event was awesome where there were tables at the front, back and balcony for people (like me) who wanted to blog and take notes, as well as the usual chairs for people who mostly wanted to listen to watch. I really liked that they scheduled 15 minute breaks between each talk which allowed for informal discussion of the topic (or for wrapping up a blog post).
Below are the talks that I took notes on, in rough order of awesome-ness. Of the the more awesome talks, for which I have no notes, was about physical computing with Ruby Aduino Development (RAD), see Chad Woolley’s notes.
- open source digital voting software
- using ruby to fight aids
- magic scaling sprinkles
- MacRuby and Hot Cocoa
- how to write fast ruby code
- ruby application frameworks
- sandbox for ruby code
- sinatra: simple ruby web app library
- ruby proxies
The only bummer of the event was the extreme gender imbalance and one innappropriate presentation that serveral folks have also blogged about. I want to reiterate that I don’t think this is reflective of the state of our society, in particular, of open source software, rather than a problem unique to the Ruby community. Time to move on and figure out how to better diversify the community (but that’s a subject for a differnt post).
Overall an awesome conference. Many thanks to Josh and Leah, Pivotal Labs, EngineYard, AT&T Interactive, New Relic and the many other sponsors, volunteers and speakers who made it happen. I look forward to attending next year!
I was thinking this whole controversy was generated by some gender angst driven hyper sensitive male who thought he needed to represent for female developers when no one was calling foul. I know three female coders, and none of them thought there was a problem with the presentation. two of them thought it was just a bad joke that didn’t work, and one of them had suggestions for how to make the presentation funnier.
Reading your post, I realize that at least one female coder was offended, and where there is one, there are more. Thanks for adding your voice to the conversation so that an actual female coder perspective can be represented. It was certainly useful to me to read that someone actually did feel uncomfortable. While I would not have chosen the same slide set, until I read your post I was under the impression that this was much ado about hypersensitivity and protecting people who did not ask to be protected.
I’m getting “not found” errors hitting links in your list of talk notes.
Links fixed. Thanks!