Ruby Hoedown Speakers Announced

Jeremy McAnally has just announced the talks that we’ll be seeing at this year’s Ruby Hoedown, and it’s a really great-looking lineup:

  • Giles Bowkett will be speaking about Archaeopteryx, a Ruby-based system for auto-generating, self-modifying music. I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews of this project, which Giles has previously spoken about at GoRuCo and the MountainWest Ruby Conference.
  • Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer (of RailsEnvy blog and podcast fame) will be speaking about a number of the most useful, ingenious and innovative developments to come out of the Ruby community over the past year. If you saw Gregg and Jason in the MVC Public Service Announcement videos at RailsConf, you know that this is bound to be an entertaining presentation.
  • Rick Bradley will be speaking about the problem of transforming a Ruby application that doesn’t have any tests into one that’s well-spec’d and has good test coverage. I’m especially looking forward to hearing this talk!
  • Rein Henrichs is the author of an upcoming book on Ruby best practice patterns (inspired by Kent Beck’s Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns book) and he’ll be speaking about that, with examples from the book.
  • Robert Dempsey will be speaking on how to employ Ruby in “cloud computing” applications, via services like Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). This is another talk that I’m looking forward to, given all of the recent development in this area.
  • Joe Kutner will be speaking about Ruleby, a rule engine for Ruby. If you’ve never used a rule engine before, you may be surprised to learn how this declarative style of programming can complement the procedural Ruby code that you’re used to.
  • Finally, Troy Davis will take a look at different APIs you can use to develop Ruby applications that can interact with phone calls to varying degrees (via platforms like Asterisk and FreeSWITCH).

In addition, we’ll have a Charity Tutorial Breakfast session during which Jim Weirich and Joe O’Brien will discuss the use of mock objects in testing. Sounds good, right? If you haven’t registered yet, get to it! The Hoedown will be held August 8 and 9 in Huntsville, Alabama. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Posted June 10th, 2008 in Ruby.

4 comments:

  1. Robert Dempsey:

    Hey Lyle,

    Thanks for the mention. I’m excited to be speaking at the Hoedown this year. What are your expectations for my talk? What would make it beneficial for you? Thanks.

    June 10th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
  2. Rein Henrichs:

    Hey Lyle,

    Looking forward to the Hoedown. I’m excited about my talk. Thanks for the mention. I hope I’ll be able to catch Giles too. Archaeopteryx sounds fascinating.

    June 10th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
  3. Lyle:

    @Robert: No particular expectations here. I know only a little about S3, and basically nothing about EC2, so I’m sure that whatever you have in mind will be informative!

    @Rein: Looking forward to hearing your observations and thoughts on best practices. It’s a subject that will benefit everyone, regardless of what they’re using Ruby for.

    June 10th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
  4. Robert Dempsey:

    @Lyle: sounds good. I will be as informative as possible while still being entertaining.

    June 11th, 2008 at 7:38 pm