Mountain West Ruby Conference

(By Drew)

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but we didn't have a good way to make this a multi-author blog. (We still don't, which is only slightly less lame than the fact that I haven't put anything up about the conference)

http://www.reductivelabs.com/images/mtnwestrubyconf-attendee-badge-170.png

I spent the weekend before last at the Mountain West Ruby Conference (March 28-29).

This was the first language centric conference I have attended and I would recommend getting involved to anyone who wants to expand their understanding of Ruby and programming.

These conferences aren't going to help someone find all the answers, but they will help you start asking the right questions, and you couldn't beat the price of MWRC. $100 for a t-shirt, 2 lunches, 2 full days of talks, plus 2 party/hackfests with a fridge packed full of redbull and a room packed with passionate programmers.

Just doesn't get much better than that. . .

The speakers topics ranged from whimsical to deep magic. Some of my favorites were Giles Bowkett on metprogramming/code generation(who had everyone monkey patching sombreros into the presentations), the keynote by Jim Weirich, and Patrick Farley on Ruby internals. The most practical presentation, at least for me and Puppet, was Philippe Hanrigou's talk on using GDB and DTrace to troubleshoot running processes.

There are some excellent resources on Phillipe's website. Anyone interested in getting insight into running Ruby processes should take advantage of what he has available.

All the speakers are online. (Thanks Confreaks and the sponsors)