The second half of day two at the Hoedown brought BOF’s (birds of a feather) during lunch time. I was in on a great BOF on getting the Ruby community to help out the community in general. The result – Ruby for Change. The purpose of Ruby for Change is to organize the Ruby/Rails-community to create driven projects to benefit real people. This is very cool and something that Rails For All is definitely going to be helping with. The BOF sessions were followed by a talk by Ken Auer titled “Does Ruby Have a Chasm to Cross?” This was a very interesting talk about the death of Smalltalk, and how Ruby can avoid the same mistakes. Long story short, the long tail that Ruby currently inhabits is not enough to sustain it long term and cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority (the “chasm”). This was an interesting talk and one which we will discuss here in posts to come. The final session was “Using C to Tune Your Ruby (or Rails) Application” by Jared Richardson. Another great talk which showed how easy it is to speed up Ruby and Rails apps by integrating C into your application.

The final keynote was a discussion on beauty by Marcel Molina. To summarize, there are three principles of beauty – proportion, integrity, and clarity. This was a thought provoking talk which is best left to you all to see.

One thing of beauty is that the speakers and the presentations were recorded and are being released under a creative commons license, and will be available here soon.

The entire conference was fantastic and well put together. Major props go out to Nathaniel Talbot and Jeremy McAnally for bringing everything together. We were definitely inspired.

Look for a Rails-centric conference to be announced within a month or two for the Orlando area, brought to you by Rails For All.

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