Rails Summit Latin America
October 16th, 2008 by
desi
I am currently in Sao Paulo, Brazil at Rails Summit Latin America and the experience has been great thus far.
Ladies at the conference there is information at the end of this writeup about how to join. If you don’t feel like reading everything in this writeup that is fine but please do read about joining.
In contrast to many conferences I have been to recently I have been to just about every talk at this conference and I have thoroughly enjoyed them all. I say just about because there is a second track that is going on in another room but I haven’t been to those sessions.
The Organizers:
Fabio Akita and Gilberto Mautner Founder of locaweb have done a great job with the conference and I would like to give them a special thanks. The lineup, venue and everything has been great. Obrigado!
Theme:
I think most conferences, through the keynotes, some how seem to create a theme. The theme that I am picking up on at this conference is this: “Have No Fear” and “Just Do It”. No one actually said either of those two things but thats basically what I am taking away from most of the keynotes. They have all been especially encouraging for people to become involved. Contribute, create, and code. Give back to the community and get involved. Don’t be afraid .. put yourself out there and learn from the feedback you get.. learn from the experiences of creating.. do side projects.. basically be PASSIONATE.
The Talks:
All the talks I have seen have been excellent. I give them an excellent rating because they have all had the qualities I look for in a talk.
1. The content is good and interesting.
2. The delivery of that content is entertaining or at least engaging.
Chad Fowler - I really enjoyed Chad’s talk and as I sit here I am struggling to figure out a way to describe his talk and actually do it justice. He spoke about his background in music and how that has translated to his life as a developer. In addition, he spoke about being remarkable. He talked about many ways in which people are remarkable and many ways in which we ourselves can become remarkable people. He touched on many things and did so in such a way that I was able to stay engaged with him. There were pictures and video’s and graphs and fake numbers and.. anyway about the best I can say is that I personally really enjoyed his talk.
Dr. Nic Williams - Dr. Nic’s presentation is a little easier to sum up but at the same time I can’t really do it justice. Dr. Nic is one of those speakers that if you ever have a chance to see him speak you should definitely take the opportunity. He is hilarious and has a good message. His talk was all about how to contribute back.. how to get involved.. how to participate. Make the future you proud of the you now. Dr. Nic also talked about newgem
Chris Wanstrath - Chris’s keynote started off being about the future of Ruby and RoR but in the end he took it back to the past and where we have come from. He went through a great deal of history on how we got here which I personally enjoyed especially when he pointed out the first ENAIC programmers were all women, unfortunately he was speaking quite fast so I think a lot of his talk was lost in translation. I think the primary thing Chris was trying to get across is to not be afraid. If you have an idea.. make time to get to it you never know where thats going to go. In the very least you gain experience and you gain knowledge. Chris has had many projects in the past but his current claim to fame is all about github.
Jay Fields - Jay’s talk was about the immaturity of testing as a whole. While I agree with some of the things he said I also disagree with some of the things he said. I have had the luxury of getting to pair with Jay on projects before and its always interesting for me to see him speak because I have first hand experience with a lot of things he talks about. He described the problem of immaturity in testing as a whole first with the fact that we can’t even agree on common terminology. He then proceeded to talk about various tools and the pros and cons of each. He covered Selenium, Test:Unit, Rspec, Syntasis, and Expectations. The last two being the most immature of them all and bleeding edge. i.e. use at your own risk. He also answered a few questions about how to make your test suite fun faster and his response was basically that if you are willing to deal with the pain that goes along with it there are tools you can look into using such as null_db, unit_record, and ARBS. You can read about them on the null_db page on Agile Web Development site. That page links out to the other plugins. Jay also pointed out that all the things he was talking about are from his point of view. In other words its the context in which he works that causes him to have some of the testing beliefs he has.
David Chemlisky - David’s first talk was about doing TDD and in my opinion he did an excellent job of demonstrating TDD. I have seen him give a talk similar in the past and of all the people I have heard try to describe TDD, David is one of the most skilled at it. He gave the talk from the point of view of a teacher which in my opinion is really the only way you can truly explain TDD. He went through the process step by step with us all to show us the way. :)
His second talk was more about Acceptance testing and story runner and the newest version of story runner which is being called cucumber. He demonstrated how it worked and made sure to give context around all the terminology such as user stories etc. Hopefully there will be some way of seeing this talk again maybe through a screen cast or something of that nature. I’ll be sure to ask him if he would be willing to do that. Or maybe there is one with cucumber? Not sure haven’t had a chance to look yet.
Couple of links to stuff he talked about.
Cucumber
webrat on github and a blog post on it here
On that last note I am actually interested to know if these talks are being recorded and if they will be available somewhere? Anyone know the answer to that?
Obie Fernandez - I haven’t actually seen Obie give his talk yet but I have seen the talk (insider information) so I am going to go ahead and give a recap.. I asked him to plug DevChix and wanted to have this write up already done before he did so.. ;-) So Obie’s talk will be about the “Hashrocket Way”. He is basically giving up our secrets.. Like Dr. Nic said no secrets! His main focus will be around how we work, the fact that we follow Agile Tenants and that we value fun, collaboration, and effectiveness. We achieve those things through certain practices such as pair programming, TDD, Story Carding, launch parties etc. Again you should check out his blog.
Ninh Bui and Hongli Lai a.k.a The Phusion Guys - I woke up late so I didn’t catch all of the talk from the Phusion guys but the part that I did catch was hilariously funny and explained things like caching and database sharding. Additionally, they gave a demo of yuumis_comments.. and here is also a link to their blog
I call out all of these guys because they are some of the best speakers I have ever seen and I actually saw them speak at this particular event.
Phillippe Hanrigou - Phillippe is going to be giving a talk on how to effectively do acceptance testing which I am looking forward to but I won’t be able to cover that here because I haven’t seen it and since I don’t have insider info on that one I’ll just have to wait like everyone else. I do know that he will be talking about one tool I hadn’t heard of before called Deep Test. You should check Phillippe’s blog as well
Luis Lavena - Luis will also be giving a talk about surviving with RoR and Ruby as a windows user.. again I think the talk is going to be awesome but its in the future so I can’t really talk about that yet. You should check out his blog!
The Venue:
The venue is quite nice. The main auditorium is very well arranged and has plenty of room despite the fact that there are a lot of people here. There is a very large screen making it easy for everyone to see the slides as well as the speakers. The lighting on the actual speakers is a little weird but other than that the actual conference room is great. The audio is fantastic and the actual hang out area is quite nice as well (other than the lack of air conditioning but thats just me being a little whiny its not really that hot). One other really important point that I want to bring up is the translators. You can get a headset at the checkin area that will translate the talks from English to Spanish and Portuguese and from what I understand the translators have been doing a kick ass job so a special thanks to all those ladies in the booths translating for us.
The Community:
I was very encouraged by the number of people at the conference, the number of people using github (vast majority) and the number of people doing Ruby and RoR development on a day to day basis. It is always an exciting moment for me when I realize it is gaining in support because how much I love the language. In addition, everyone has been extremely helpful and friendly. We meet Tim Case the first day and he was more than willing to take us under his wing and show us around.
One thing that was both encouraging and discouraging is the number of women at the conference. There were women, thats the good news, the bad news is that I think from a ratio point of view the number of women at the conference is on par with what I have experienced at Ruby and RoR conferences in the US. That is to say its pretty small. Usually at conferences since there are so few women I can manage to talk to most of them and but here I have been some what intimidated by the language barrier. One other thing to point out is that there were no women speakers but hey that isn’t really that uncommon. I am hoping that when Obie does his talk and plugs DevChix for us that many of those women who were at the conference that I didn’t get to meet will come to the site and join.
Ladies Please Read
For those women who do happen to come to the site from Brazil and other countries. I would like to say that we have members world wide who can speak a number of different languages so please don’t let that discourage you from joining and participating. We would LOVE to have you all as part of the group. Also encourage other female developers you know.
If you are a women, a developer, interested in joining and/or contributing to DevChix, please contact Desi McAdam at info(-at-)devchix.com with your:
1. Name
2. Email
3. Do you know any one from DevChix?
4. A short 2 sentence bio describing your development background/experience (or what you hope to learn) and a link to your blog if you happen to have one.
Obrigado! :)
