Conference

This last weekend I went to the Lone Star Ruby Conference 2013. It was a good conf. Of course, there were some weak talks and bad wifi issues, but overall, it was the most enjoyable and useful conference I’ve been to. Highlights Sandi Metz’s keynote looking at the history of writing and tech - Always great to hear that you’re going to be obselete and thus, you need to remember what your priorities are. Dave Thomas’s talk on Exlir - Showed off the power of the language by live-coding and having a good time doing it. Brandon Hays’ talk on Ember.js and Rails - perhaps the best beginner talk I’ve ever seen. Great combo of funny, interesting, informative and technical enough to be useful. Sarah Mei’s talk on fostering creativity and problem solving - Just a great talk–well delivered and interesting. Best soft talk of the conf. Nell Shamrell’s talk on RegEx - Super informative, well delivered and highly technical without alientating anyone. 200 devs paying attention to every word she’s saying about how a RegEx parser works. That’s mad skills. Sam Livingston-Gray’s talk on Refactoring - Wonderful talk that dove deep enough to give you an idea of HOW to refactor something. I always forget that it is one small thing at a time. Getting to meet and visit with people I had only known on twitter before like @_zph and @avdi. Getting to meet lots of people interesting in #pairwithme. Bryan Helmkamp: “Your goal is to make refactoring invisible. It should happen every time you touch the code. Little improvements here and there.” Getting to give my Lightning Talk on #pairwithme Overall a great conf. It seemed like the best and most interesting talks weren’t focused on Ruby–with the exception of @geeksam’s talk on refactoring. Nearly every talk worth it’s salt was either talking about broadening your horizons or improving your code quality. That’s a tall order, and it’s a great thing that the Ruby community embraces it. ...