I have an hour or so to kill while I’m waiting here in the Orlando airport for my flight back to Huntsville, so I thought I’d post a quick summary of RubyConf 2008.

The conference was held at the Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate. The Omni is big place, and they were hosting several other conferences at the same time as as RubyConf (including, ironically, some sort of tanning convention). The resort has two or three swimming pools, including a “lazy river” which I took advantage of for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon. They also have a golf course if you’re into that kind of thing, and free shuttle access to the Disney parks. As a location for a technical conference, however, the Omni is sort of a mixed bag. There are a number of seating places throughout the hotel where groups of Rubyists could gather to talk or hack on things, which was convenient. The (free) Wi-Fi coverage throughout the hotel was also very good. The resort is fairly isolated, however, and as a result those of us without cars were mostly restricted to eating at the pricey on-site restaurants. A shortage of power outlets in the conference rooms also presented a challenge for those of us using notebooks with short battery lives, but in hindsight I think it was a good thing that I wasn’t able to leave my computer open for very long during the presentations. I was a lot less distracted by IRC, Twitter, e-mail, etc. and I got a lot more out of the presentations as a result.

If there was a unifying theme for this year’s RubyConf, it was probably “love”. We heard a lot about love this weekend. And that’s not a bad thing, but it was no doubt a reaction to some of the pre-conference controversy and the more general problem of divisions in the Ruby community that have become more pronounced over the last couple of years. We also took time out to recognize the contributions of Guy Decoux and Itojun, both important Rubyists who passed away this past year.

This year’s RubyConf had three tracks, and I saw a lot of really excellent presentations. I’m not going to try to summarize the talks, because the conference videos will be up on the Confreaks site in due time, but I will mention a couple of presentations that you should look for. I’ve been trying to up my testing game over the last month or so, and Francis Hwang’s talk on “Testing Heresies” (Thursday afternoon) dealt with a number of dogmatic beliefs that we tend to have about testing and why some of those ideas may not hold up under examination. Greg Borenstein’s presenation on “Ruby Arduino Development” (Friday morning) was really interesting to me, and included a number of really compelling demos (including, at the end, a Ruby-powered drink mixer). Jim Weirich’s talk on “What Every Rubyist Should Know About Threads” (Friday afternoon) was a good refresher course for me; as I told someone, about once a year I need to hear (or read) what someone smarter than me has to say about developing mutli-threaded applications, so I’m sure still on the right track. Jake Scruggs’ talk on metrics (also on Friday afternoon) was a good survey of the tools available for static code analysis (such as RCov, Flog, and Saikuro) and how to interpret their results. Finally, Neal Ford’s talk on “Advanced DSLs in Ruby” (on Saturday morning) covered a number of techniques for building DSLs in Ruby and the best practices for doing so (along with some of the problems you can run into in the process).

So, all in all, another great RubyConf. Many thanks to Ruby Central, the conference organizers, and FiveRuns, the conference sponsor!