thoughts.on.code

I put my InfoTec 2007 presentations online last night. If you don’t want to hear about how much fun I had giving them, here is the link.

My first talk was a 4 hour “Introduction to Ruby on Rails”. It had a decent turnout, and was a lot of fun to give. Thanks to a IM chat with Harish the night before the talk, I gave the best line I’ve given so far in a talk (IMHO): “So, what type of web application would you like to build today?”

My second talk was “Agile Java Web Frameworks”. There were twice as many people in this talk that had signed up before the conference started, though slightly fewer than in my rails talk. A slightly disjointed talk, I hit upon some of the more interesting web frameworks in the java world: Struts2, Spring MVC/WebFlow, Click, Rife, and then the dynamic contenders: Grails, Rails, and Lift.

Click was an interesting experience, as I had only learned about it the night before from Stephen Haberman. It looks pretty promising.

We only had enough time to quickly dive into one of the frameworks, and the audience chose Grails. So we delved into the bowels of GroovyQuiz and I showed them how it works.

Overall I had a lot of fun, and am looking forward to next years InfoTec.

I’ve got a few talks coming up in the next couple months:

March:

Domain Specific Languages - I’ll be talking to the Omaha Dynamic Language Users Group on March 6th.    I will be focusing on the Groovy language, but may slip in some Ruby and Lisp.

Basic Spring -  This talk will be part of the Omaha Java Users Group March 20th meeting.  It will be a “nothing but Spring” meeting.   Nick Larson will be talking about Spring MVC, whil I will focus on the fundamentals.

April:

This year I will be presenting at Infotec, the local Omaha conference for Information Technologies, put together by the local AITP association.  I have one session and one tutorial:

Agile Java Web Frameworks - sort of an omnibus of the latest frameworks, and of course what a “agile web framework” is.

Introduction to Ruby on Rails - this will be a four, yes FOUR, hour tutorial  using Ruby on Rails.  I am so excited to be doing this!  We will be building an application from scratch, covering most of the features in Rails.
Should be a fun couple of months!

So, last weekend I went to RubyConf 2006. And yes I am finally getting around to writing about it… and this probably won’t be the last time. It was a very interesting experience for me, but I have not quite got my mind around all that happened there yet.

It was immensely fun, and I definitely learned alot. It was great catching up with so many people that I have met over the last few years. And of course, how can you not have fun hacking on code into the wee hours of the night? (even though a little bit of it was *gasp* Java! *gasp*)

If you have not seen the blow-by-blow, take a look at Nick Seiger’s blog. Also, there are a ton more links out there:

A great one-act/one-man play by Adam Keys at RejectConf (which I unfortunately missed… too busy writing code and trying to find coffee ).

Tim Bray has a recap and some comments on his talk.

Curt Hibbs aggregates it all

Also, Ruby-lang chimes in (with some more linkage).

Get your registration on here: RubyConf.com

It will be interesting to see how long it lasts.

Update: Apparently it lasts about 1 day! Just checked the site and they are sold out, but are accepting people on the waiting list.

My talks for OSCON 2006, and the Central Iowa NoFluffJustStuff conference are all up on my Presentations page. Go check them out!

I am starting the recovery process from 7 days of conference. I first talked at NFJS in Des Moines, IA over last weekend. Five minutes after my presentation I was on a shuttle to the airport to make my flight to Portland! And then it was 5 days of OSCON. It was awesome to go to such a large conference and meet so many people! It was especially cool to get to give a presentation to this great crowd.

I also had a lot of fun going to FOSCON II while I was out in Portland. FOSCON is a Rubyist gathering one evening during the conference, put on by the PDX.rb group. This was probably the most interesting single thing I saw, as FOSCON was held at FreeGeek, a local FOSS community center of sorts, which was PACKED. I took the pub crawl route with a number of others, and by the time we got there the pizza was demolished. Even so, it was great, and some really cool talks were given.