Yesterday was the first ever Los Angeles Ruby Conference. Despite being located a bit out of the way, down in Tustin, the venue was actually completely amazing. Called the Marconi Automotive Museum, the place was like “Robin Master’s garage” quipped one attendee, being that it was FULL of Ferrari’s and other highly valuable and hot sports cars.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Coby Randquist and JR Fent, along with a host of others, this first conference was a tremendous success. There was an incredible lineup of speakers, with something for everyone. All of us who attended were really impressed by the quality of the event. There was even one guy who came all the way from Boston (this is great time of year to visit California from the east coast, people). After a short introduction, the program was off and running.
The sessions were:
Dan Yoder - “Resource Oriented Architectures and Why It Matters”
Aaron Patterson - “Journey Thru A Pointy Forest, or You Suck At XML”
Jeremy Evans - “Sequel”
Danny Blitz - “Herding Tigers - Software Development and the Art of War”
Wolfram Arnold - “Scaling ‘most popular’ lists: a plugin solution”
Blake Mizerany - “Sinatra: The Ultimate Rack Citizen”
Michael Fairchild & Ari Lerner - “Poolparty.rb”
Bill Lapcevic - “Managing Ruby on Rails for High Performance”
Ron Evans & Damen Evans - “Flying Robot: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using Ruby and Arduino”
John Barnette & Aaron Patterson - “Johnson”
Pradeep Elankumaran - “Fast and Scalable Front/Back-end Services using Ruby, Rails, and XMPP”
Brendan Lim - “Mobilize Your Rails Application”
Adam Blum - “Rhodes Framework for Mobile Client Development”
Jim Weirich - Keynote speech - “The Grand Unified Theory of Software Development”
I took copious notes, and so I will be posting separately for each session, to avoid a massive blob post. The sessions were quite excellent, our demo of flying_robot was really well received, and Jim Weirich’s keynote was by turns funny and thought provoking.
Thank you to everyone who participated by organizing, presenting, and/or attending LARubyConf. The 110 or so people there really appreciated it! I had a great time, learned a lot, met some great new people, and got to see some old friends. I really look forward to the next one!
