Socks and Sandals

Wow, this year’s ETE was even better than last year. A bigger crowd, a better venue and great speakers made this year the best yet. I can’t wait for next years! There’s a lot of cool stuff going on around the Philly area that you’d never know if it weren’t for events like this. E.g. did you know MapQuest is located in Lancaster, PA? I had no idea until yesterday.

In other conference news, my talk yesterday went pretty well. People seemed to really enjoy it and the room was full. You can view my talk slides on Hadoop on my talks page along with my other slides from previous talks (including last year’s ETE talk on Comet).

Thanks to Chariot for putting on another excellent event, in particular Tracey Welson-Rossman and her merry band of awesome facilitators! Keep it going for next year :)

I’m speaking about Hadoop today at 4PM EDT at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. Its located at Drexel University. Come on down if you can make it; the speaker list is great and I’m sure it will be a great time for all!

Last night I gave a presentation on Scala to the Philly Lambda group. The slides are available here. It was a pretty good time and about 15 people or so showed up for the talk. The space was graciously provided in the really cool-looking Cira Centre down at 30th St. by Aaron Feng of Algorithmics. Thanks to Aaron and all who attended; I had a great time presenting!

I just got back from RubyConf 2007 tonight and it was awesome! The conference was a well-oiled machine with superb content and attendees. My only beef, and this is small, is that the hotel Wifi was a bit weak, but that’s to be expected.

Confreaks video-taped the whole conference, including RejectConf and they said the video will be available for streaming and download sometime next week. Their videos are awesome so you should definitely check them out.

The level of conversation in the hallways and taverns was just unreal. There were so many smart people there working on really great stuff that I didn’t know who to talk to next!

Evan’s keynote was probably the best talk of the conference for me, but I’m a bit biased towards Rubinius, given my previous issues with the MRI as it stands today . Francis Hwang’s talk was the most intriguing and made me think the most. Ryan Davis’s talk was packed and really entertaining. I missed Laurent’s talk but it was similarly packed and people said it was hyper-cool. Eric’s talk was really awesome, too, as he was giving us all his tips about how to stay productive: coming from a guy with 40+ open source projects under his belt, that’s definitely good info.

Some highlights for me, in no particular order:

• Got to meet Tim Bray and he’s just as sharp as I though, if not sharper
• Met some of the Twitter guys and they are really, really cool, down-to-earth dudes
• I finally got to meet Matz in person and I used the opportunity to interrogate him on the state of Ruby’s GC
• Ryan Davis and Francis Hwang gave me some really good tips on testing and I am very grateful for that
• Had a couple really good conversations with Evan Phoenix ; man
  • He’s one smart-ass cookie and a great showman, too
• Hung out with a bunch of really smart and interesting Rubyists, including Obie Fernandez and Steven Bristol
• Talked to Ezra a bunch about Merb and Engine Yard and got to meet Yehuda Katz
• Played in a video-taped Werewolf game with some of the best Rubyists in the world (who shall remain nameless at this time because the game became… uh, lets say “controversial”)

There wasn’t a lot of Rails-related stuff there (which was good) and the people who were there were really into Ruby, not just Rails. DHH didn’t even show up so the noise level was low.

I’m definitely going to be going to RubyConf 2008. Thanks to Rich, David and Chad for an awesome conference!

I just gave a presentation about the Erlang programming language to the Philly Linux User Group on Wednesday night. The slides are available in the first link. It was an introductory talk focused towards a programming-oriented group. Let me know what you think :)