RubyFringe presents... FutureRuby — Leaders of Tomorrow, Today!

posted by meghann on February 19th, 2009


RubyFringe was a highly successful conference in July of 2008. We had the audacity to do things a little differently: a single track, small (150 attendee) format with an insane speaker list and memorable parties each night left a lot of people wishing they’d come. It was a hugely positive moment in our lives, and we’re really proud: we still have everyone’s Polaroid snaps on the wall here at Unspace.

Almost immediately people wanted to know when the “next RubyFringe” was going to be. Once the smoke cleared and the conversations continued, it became clear that there was a momentum and we wanted to initiate a follow-up. However, we don’t want to fall into the same trap that has made other conferences feel overgrown and predictable. RubyFringe was a one-off event, and whatever comes next will have to stand on its own.

Comic crafted by the ingenious Nick Wolfe of Name Removed fame. We love Nick!

The fringe of today is the mainstream of tomorrow.

Let’s face it: we Rubyists have a lot to figure out, and we’d better get on that if we don’t want Ruby to fall victim to partisan politics or the whims of venture capital. We might feel like we’re a long way from Ruby being regarded in the same light as Java, but in 1994 Java was considered subversive. That wasn’t that long ago!

FutureRuby is an opportunity to prepare for the future by learning from the mistakes of the past.

So what’s the deal? It’s still early, but the big picture is that we’re taking everything that worked well at RubyFringe, tightening up some loose ends, and adding more cool shit. This is not a repeat of RubyFringe events. Don’t come expecting the same things in the same places!

The devil and the details

FutureRuby will take place July 9-12th, 2009 and returns to the swanky Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto, Canada. The official website launches on Friday, March 6th with all the flashy pomp and touchy details. Tickets go on sale 11am Monday, March 9th.

We’ve decided to go with a flexible cost structure this year, keeping the early bird price the same as last year:

Early Bird: $700.00 ENDS APRIL 20TH
Regular: $800.00 ENDS JUNE 15TH
Rush: $900.00 ENDS JUNE 29th
Walk-ins: EPIC FAIL - NO EXCEPTIONS!

So there you have it! We hope to see you in July. If you have questions or ideas, drop us a line at futureruby@unspace.ca.

9 comments

How do you motivate?

posted by pete on February 14th, 2009

As much as those “de-motivation” posters are tired and cliche, I really think this one just about sums it up for me:

I am an expert procrastinator. I procrastinate a lot: sometimes to the point of masochism. Luckily I’m also a pretty darn responsible fellow, and coming through in the end is something I’m pretty good at. I spend a lot of time wondering how I can tweak myself into “the zone” even in the face of distractions, Reddit, and Lost. Nothing on Facebook has ever dramatically changed the outcome of my software development, but I often compulsively refresh it just in case someone might have responded to someone else’s status update. It’s silly, but we all do it to some degree or another.

I personally enjoy and benefit a lot from pair programming. It’s not something I get to do all of the time, but a solid pairing session with a good developer gets me results. I love sharing tricks, and discussing code before it’s written. However, there might be more to it than that.

Hampton and I started to speculate that we work best if someone is just there, keeping you on your toes. Someone to chastise you if you check Facebook, even if they don’t know the first thing about programming. We joked about hiring people to just sit there and watch us code. I laughed!

Well, I’m not laughing any more. I tried it, and it worked.

Soft Pairing

I invited a developer friend to come and sit beside me as I worked. He had his laptop, and I asked him to just do what he’d normally do; we were explicitly not working on the same thing. Occasionally something would be discussed, or we’d share a laugh… but for the most part the experiment was untarnished by anything resembling classic pair programming.

During this time, I felt alert and focused. My productivity was about as high as it ever is, and for some reason his presence didn’t bother me. My junk science theory here is that it was the commitment to be doing this thing, putting in the effort to show up — it makes it feel real to your brain. Facebook is captivating when you’re alone, but feels like an embarrassment when someone else is there.

Your mileage will vary, but this “soft pairing” works well for me. I’m no longer thinking that hiring someone at minimum wage to just sit and watch me is a joke; it might well be an amazing investment. Alternatively, you could invite a developer friend to come over, or your partner that never sees you might enjoy reading a book. Hard to say! They have to really get the part about concentration, and it’s possible that your lover quietly chuckling and flipping pages might drive you bonkers.

Maybe this is like having a gym buddy? You agree to meet at a time and go, even if once you’re there, you’re doing completely different things. It’s the statement of intention which compels us not to succumb to distraction.

14 comments

MeshU: Three of the smartest developers in the world, and me

posted by pete on February 11th, 2009

Word has started to go around today that I’m going to be giving a talk called Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? at MeshU. It’s true — I really can’t spare you when there’s an opportunity to say something cheeky.

I seem to have a distinct knack for getting myself smack in the middle of people that are several orders of magnitude more important than I ever hope to be. For example, check out this lineup:

From left to right, that’s Microsoft’s Chris Wilson, who wrote IE. Then there’s Douglas Crockford, who invented JSON. Then Aaron Gustafson, a mover in the standards and accessible web development community. Then me. Then John Resig (he created the jQuery JavaScript framework), and finally Joe Walker of DWR fame. Too funny!

So the development track of MeshU is going to be Chris Wanstrath from GitHub and Ezra from EngineYard, who represent 20% of the top ten Ruby programmers alive today. “Rails Hero” Ilya isn’t just one of the most helpful members of the Rails world, but he’s a wizard at performance optimization, too.

Me? I’m humbled and slightly intimidated by my esteemed company… but I’m going to do my part to deliver a really information-rich session on iPhone development. From the summary, here’s what I’ll be discussing:

This is not a coding workshop! My goal is to educate attendees about their options for targeting a relatively new platform. Specifically, our company has a lot of experience with hybrid native/web applications that wrap an instance of Safari to communicate with a web service providing content customized for the iPhone. We believe that this is the best of both worlds: hybrid applications have the advantages of being first class iPhone apps that can be updated immediately, without waiting for Apple’s approval to push out a minor update.

Are there things not on the list which you think would be good to address?

I went to MeshU as an attendee last year and was genuinely impressed at the quality of the sessions. This is a cheap, no-bullshit event that Toronto geeks would be ill-advised to miss.

Update: It occurs to me that I’ve never heard of a Ruby programmer dying. Someone call Ray Kurzweil.

2 comments