Matt Sears

Last week I made a short drive to Columbus for the erubycon conference presented by the EdgeCase crew. The three day conference, hosted by Microsoft, was an event to demonstrate Ruby's role in the enterprise. Having worked in the Enterprise for six years, I was very excited to learn more about how Ruby can change the Enterprise.
Photo credit: EdgeCase, LLC What is legacy code and how do we avoid it? Stuart Halloway addresses these questions with his talk Ending Legacy Code In Our Lifetime. This was my favorite talk on the first day because the Enterprise is "full of it" and much my time was spent trying to avoid it. It's nice to see somebody calling attention to it.
Photo credit: EdgeCase, LLC Very interesting talk on JRuby by it's creator Charles Nutter on the second day. I went back to the hotel room that evening and setup JRuby on my laptop. I wrote a quick rails app and with Warbler, had a working war file ready to be deployed to Java application server. Very impressive.
Photo credit: EdgeCase, LLC Perhaps my favorite session at the conference was Jim Weirich's talk on concurrent software development. Something I don't think is talked about enough and is certainly important in the Enterprise. I've written multi-threaded apps in Java and it can be very difficult especially avoiding deadlocks. Is Ruby the answer? According to Jim, not really. Perhaps a Erlang or Clojure offers a better solution.
Photo credit: EdgeCase, LLC And Finally, Chris Wanstrath, co-creator of GitHub talks about Git, GitHub, and a little about side projects. Oh, and did I mention I really love GitHub? It's really changing how we develop software.
Photo credit: EdgeCase, LLC * All the photos above are provided by EdgeCase, LLC and more are available on their Flickr page.