RubyNation 2012

RubyNation is awesome. Most ruby events are awesome, but in particular I enjoy RubyNation because it's local to me. It's not that I don't like traveling to other conferences or that I think Washington DC is the best possible place for a conference. What I love about RubyNation being local is having 200+ ruby developers from my immediate locale in one single place, at one single time. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have Jim Weirich and Corey Haines show up, either.

The other thing I love about RubyNation are all the great talks. Even the bad talks are still good talks. Even the terrible talks turn into great talks because when you step into the hallway, there are amazing people who showed up to RubyNation waiting to have a great talk with you. Every year, without fail, I meet new people and learn new things. I don't think you can put a price tag on that.

There were lots of highlights for me this year, and some surprises. The first surprise should really have been no surprise at all, since it's a developing trend at all Ruby/Rails related events: JavaScript. In his opening keynote, Justin Getland says something to the effect of "Adapt or die". Justin's message was clear: wherever there is a gap, someone will be there to fill it. There is a gap in JavaScript knowledge, so it's time to step in or someone else will.

The first day at RubyNation had one track that was entirely JavaScript and View focused. The second track was a grab bag of ruby related topics such as toolkits or programming approaches. Some of the JS/View track presentations that stuck out to me were:

Roy Tomeij's talk on Modular and Reusable Front-End code, Brennan Dunn's talk on Rails Without Views, John Athayde's talk on The Rails View: The Junk Drawer Grows Up, Chris Strom's talk on You Ain't SPDY

Andrew Glover's Asynchronous Processing and Messaging talk was a great introduction to Resque and Redis. Although I didn't attend his talk, people told me that Mike Subelsky's talk Coding for Uncertainty was amazing. Before you knew it, Jim Weirich was wrapping up day one by teaching us how to use Ruby for purely functional programming purposes to implement the Y Combinator.

Day two had a couple of front end related talks, but really seemed to focus more on some of the toolkits we use with ruby and some theory to help rubyists navigate the programming waters.

I really enjoyed Russ Olsen's Eloquent Expressions and Jeff Casimir's Adventures on the Golden Path. As well, Patrick Peak and Nathen Harvey gave great talks on how to better organize your applications with mountable applications and deployment strategies, respectively. Anthony Burton has posted a more complete list of talks here.

Corey Haines closed out the event with a call to arms for our community to mentor the next generation. Corey's point was simple: there is a need for more developers. Companies will step in to "make" new ones. Do you want good developers or bad developers? Ruby Tutor is a place where we can help to make the next generation great.

Thanks to all the people who made RubyNation such a great event this year. See you all next year.