GoRuCo 2009

gotham ruby confrence is the nyc’s own ruby conference organized by nyc ruby users group. it was my second time attending it. this post is an attempt to organize my own notes, as well as an attempt at feedback that i think i owe to the speakers and the organizers.

i really like the smaller focused gatherings like this with around a hundred-plus attendees – there is definitely a community spirit there, since a lot of the folks are local and already know each other.

there is also more focused discussion, since the background of the people in the room is similar. a lot of the culture is shared, a lot of the values are implied, and the conversation zips along nicely. i have stopped attending local java groups precisely for the lack of this common background – the topics are too broad, the backgrounds are too different, and it takes a lot of effort to communicate ideas.

i am a bit uneasy about my own relationship with the ruby community – i am not really contributing, nor am i doing paid ruby work. i also am a bit weary of the monoculture (look at them macboys and macgirls!) that tends to re-invent the wheel way too often. but i am there for the excitement, for the bright-eyed kids that tinker and create things – this energy is infectious and i feed off it. it is inspirational and energizing.

so why am i going to the conferences like these? in addition to the energy boost i mentioned above, there is also the trivia of learning about tools, projects, approaches; getting the feel for the zeitgeist, where things are heading, what folks are thinking. deep down inside i am always looking for the “blow your mind” experience, something that can turn a familiar topic on its head, something that can make me discover things i have never suspected existed.

GoRuCo had a nice balance – things technical and detailed, and also approaches/techniques/principles. the reject conf at the end – a series of quick lightning talks – was an icing on the cake, stuffing you full of references, pointers, tips that you could take home and work through at your own pace.

Gregory Brown: Where is Ruby really heading?

more of a book report, talking about different versions of ruby out there. for anyone following the community, none of it was a surprise. no hard data either, just his personal anecdotal experience. this part of the talk was more suited to a short user group presentation.

there were a few nice tips and personal war stories related to moving between 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9.1, unicode, side-by-side installs and very basic crude techniques to code for different versions.

these are typical growing pains – everything from the compatibility issues between versions to the curse of the system-wide install that makes one go an extra mile in order to run different apps under different ruby versions on the same box (i always preferred the semi-structured self-contained java jdk installs and jars controlled by the classpath).

there were some props to jruby (it is a real distro, not a hack to reach out for when all else fails!), mentions of ffi in jruby that allowed gregory’s project to run on windows.

Eleanor McHugh: The Ruby Guide to *nix Plumbing

this could have been a great talk, but it seems like eleanor was really hungover, so instead it was a very disconnected series of ramblings on the general subject of unix and coding. very poor delivery, and at times plain embarrassing.

only towards the end she managed to find the message for the talk, which was “you can code against kernel internals using ruby, since it makes it much easier. do not automatically assume that you need to write in C for performance – try ruby first.”

she also highlighted ruby community’s respect for bare-metal – the ability to tinker, the taste for small simple tools that do the job well, and the affinity for unix. this is exactly what attracted me to the language in the first place.

there were a lot of references that at times seemed like name-dropping: ngnix, beej’s guide to network programming, beej’s guide to unix interprocess communication, ruby/dl, duby, event machine, c10k problem, advanced unix programming book

Dan Yoder: Resource-Oriented Architecture With Waves

dan briefly talked about his waves framework that tries to present a simple DSL around HTTP and resource representation in a REST fashion.

the meat of the talk that was interesting to me dealt with REST in general, its differences from MVC, resource-oriented architecture, self-describing data, returning links to other data inside of data to aid discoverability. he mentioned how a resource identifier (e.g. URL) should not specify representation (i.e. do not add .xml to specify that you need an XML document back), but rely on client’s Accept* headers to negotiate representation (caveat being that CDNs like Akamai do not currently care about these headers, so you will always get the same content).

there was also a mention of the fact that sometimes one can view HTTP protocol as something dealing with a distributed hash table (DHT) using get/put/delete operations (with post reserved for everything else).

RDF and freebase were also mentioned.

i have a strange relationship with REST: i get it on the technical level, i sort of get it on the architecture level, but it did not fully “click” yet, perhaps due to the fact that i do not have enough practical implementations under my belt. i should go through the restful webservice book again and play around.

good talk overall, but lacking concrete examples that could have brought things more into focus.

Jake Howerton: Into the Heart of Darkness: Rails Anti-Patterns

a bit of a disappointment, since the title promised so much. i usually really liked the anti-pattern talks, since you learn nothing when things work as expected – the real learning comes when things break, and you are forced to dig in and figure out why. plus these talks also give you an idea of applicability of certain techniques, which is really a required counterpart for all patterns to begin with (beware of dartboard-driven design).

instead we were treated to a very few amusing short code snippets, but no larger patterns in the sense of fowler’s refactoring book or even rails-specific patterns.

he did mention cucumber, reek and metric_fu and some general well-known testing techniques. i liked his term “flight check” for the smoke tests that run before deployment to prod, and a notion of sandbox test environment where mocks are replaced with real classes that do destructive things without impacting the real world (like sending emails).

i also like his term “irb-driven design” for something that was copy-pasted from the exploratory irb session into the production code.

there was also some treatise of legacy code, but i think dhh’s talk on the subject was much better.

overall it was a fun, light talk that was well-received. i blame the deceiving title and the lack of focus for initial feeling of disappointment; it felt like jake was simply talking about things he does and prefers to do during development, without specific overarching theme in mind.

Sandi Metz: SOLID Object Oriented Design

sandi stole the show; she set the level that none of the speakers matched and showed what it really means to have a solid, gripping presentation that is lucid, focused, well-prepared, and superbly delivered.

she talked about SOLID design principles: Single Responsibility, Open Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion which all boil down to managing dependencies.

she went through the fowler’s value of design argument, and then iteratively went through a refactoring example, invoking the SOLID principles along the way.

i think the most impressive for me was how well the whole talk came together, how the arguments were presented to support the refactorings, and how well it got into my head (almost uncanny, similar to the effect the best books in head first series have).

some of the principles she kept bringing up – using the rate of change as the indicator for splitting the functionality; refactor in small steps to let the design emerge – not because you know, but because you want to find the design; red-green-refactor; mock at the seam; only mock classes i own; those that change often should depend on those that change less often.

this once again brings up the importance of developing a language to discuss design (e.g. patterns) – i think this is a crucial step for every practitioner, when something intuitive and personal (e.g. a vague code smell) becomes something that you can articulate and communicate to others.

she also mentioned uncle bob, micronaut, steve freeman and nat pryce mock objects site

Benjamin Stein: Building Cross Platform Mobile Apps with Ruby & PhoneGap

the main promise of PhoneGap is quite compelling – build cross-platform apps on the phones using javascript while taking advantage of the native features (vibrate, storage, accelerometer, sound, gps, etc).

it was a fine presentation, with a story to tell and with a perspective that put all the low-level details in context. makes me itchy to get my hands on some phone development; i was also quite impressed with their adoption of latest standards (e.g. HTML5).

Yehuda Katz: From Rails to Rack: Making Rails 3 a Better Ruby Citizen

rails3 perspective from the horse’s mouth – quite detailed look at how rails is trying to be less opinionated in its choice of frameworks to work with, and how it exposes its internals for others to integrate with (orm, rack, js frameworks). some very interesting examples of design decisions and the overall future path of the framework.

this was a bit tedious, but quite informative talk.

Lightning Talks

i really like these, since most people do not have enough material for a long talk; in fact some of the main talks earlier should probably have been half their size.

the highlights include sunlight foundation and data.gov plug, a great pair of fast talks by aman gupta on google-perftools that he tweaked to work with ruby and used on some real-world code and joe damato on tweaking the thread performance in ruby 1.8 (in retrospect, these two talks were something i wish eleanor would have done).