Friday, July 30, 2010

RubyMidwest Part 2


Day 2 started off with an inspirational session from Katz and continued with more technical seminars.
Me, reading about the content of the presentation

One that most people ignored, but had some impact for me was Mark Daggett's Facebook presentation. The big quote for that one is "Facebook development is like building a ship in a bottle... inside another bottle... while wearing mittens." It gave me a shudder at all the times I tried to start using Linux back in the late 90's and being thwarted with the only comments from other user being "ura lamer". Thankfully, "lol" wasn't in much use back then. I have wanted to try to figure out a way to tap in to less technical people to get the word of Lomby Zombie out there, and it gave me an idea for my idea junk drawer to do.

The other that stuck with me was "G.U.R.S.F.S.A - The Grand Unified Ruby Solution For System Administration" by Joshua French. Being a system administrator for many years and specializing into Configuraiton Management, this was exactly what I am all about. The basic takeaway was that Ruby is just as good or better of an interpreted/scripting language for admins to get their work done, just like Perl or Python. I have been using small ruby scripts to watch things for me on my virtual servers and took this as a solidation of my own work.

As the conference wore down, Jen and I went over to O'Dowd's for beer and dinner with whoever stuck around. We had a nice dinner and conversations with Alex Sharp, Aman Gupta, and Nick Quaranto. Afterwards, a quick stop at the toy store down the street and a huge walk back to the hotel, which Jen claims was an attempt by me to cause her asthma to spark to kill her.