Jake Scruggs

I was thinking today that most people design their talk to last 50-55 minutes but I've noticed that conferences have shorter and shorter times slots. 40 minutes + 5 for questions is becoming the standard. So the end slides tend to go by pretty fast. Another thought: Print the ID badge for the conference on both sides. Exactly the same information on both sides. Fully 50% of the people at Ruby Conf have their badges turned around to the white side and when I can't remember their names (even though we were just introduced) I can't cheat because all I see is a stupid white rectangle. Somehow GLSEC managed to figure this out, why can't other conferences? JRuby: What, Why, How...Try It Now by Tom Enebo and Charlie Nutter Why JRuby? Well the JVM is awesome. 15 quadriliion man years of work or something. 15 quadriliion Sun man years can't be wrong, right? They have declared that Ruby 1.8 is "done" (again) and 1.9 mode can be triggered with a flag. Full ...

A light day for me as a 4 hour flight + 2 hour time change + wanting to see my wife for a few hours this weekend means I left early. Before I get started I wanted to say a few words about Portland: It's a great city. The train took us from the airport straight to the convention center (and our hotel which was 2 blocks away). Then we found out the train is free in the downtown area. So we had super easy access to bars/food/good times. Also the city, while being big enough to support an ecosystem of coolness is small enough to avoid being overwhelming. Keynote – The Rails Way with Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski: General format of this talk was here's a submission we got for inclusion into Rails core and here is what's wrong with it. Oddly enough they called the people out by name – the ones who had the bad code. Not sure how I'd feel about being outed like that. [Correction: Koz informs me that people had submitted their code to The Rails Way (not core) and were...

Keynote (AKA paid sponsor time) – Cyndi Mitchell ( ThoughtWorks ) and Tim Bray (Sun): Cyndi seemed a bit nervous and well she should be – this is ThoughtWorks big play to mold the face of the Ruby/Rails world by announcing RubyWorks . RubyWorks is a “free, open source LAMP production stack is for RedHat Enterprise Edition and CentOS , and will allow users to quickly put Rails applications on production servers.” Pull it down, drop in yer Rails app, and you gots a server. It's all free, but if maybe you'd like some support we could perhaps sell you some. And we'll support JRuby . Pretty big move for us as a company. So why would we expose ourselves to this risk? Other than the tons of money we stand to make, ThoughtWorks feels like the Java/.NET world is all wrapped up with horrible bloatware and bad management practices and while we're still interested in fighting for change in those areas we feel think there's an opportunity to make a real impact in a w...