Just got back from RubyFringe in Toronto and have some serious sleep to catch up on. Pete Forde and crew at UnSpace did a fantastic job of organizing this, part tech, part culture, part revival, part cocktail party event. The photostream speaks for itself.
There were several great talks. My favorite was Damien Katz’s very personal story of cashing in his chips as a programmer @ IBM in Boston, selling the house, moving the family back home to Charlotte, NC to be nearer to family…all with any prospect of a job waiting for him. I can seriously relate to that leap and it was inspiring to hear him relate the highs and lows that a change like that entails. Damien says he knew peole worked on really cool projects and asked himself why he couldn’t be one of those people. He took the leap and made it happen - with a wife and lovely baby girl besid ehim. Apache CouchDB definitely counts as a cool project. I love that Damien admitted to not knowing how to build CouchDB when he started. But, he stuck it out and did it. Props.
There were plenty of other highlights; I’m sure the live recordings of Zed Shaw will get noticed by the Ruby/Rails community. I thought that was fun to watch but strangely self indulgent. Maybe having 3 young kids at home has developed my appreciation for childish behavior - I enjoy watching them do silly stuff too.
Strangely self indulgent? That could sum up the dominate Ruby community persona
Yeah - not completely untrue.