• Read more about Windy City Rails 2010

It’s absolutely fantastic when a conference has Wi-Fi, power, and tables, and WindyCityRails had all three! Generously hosted by ChicagoRuby at the Westin, right on the Chicago River, WindyCityRails was a one-day conference that was packed full of awesome.

Unfortunately, I was only able to make it for the morning sessions, but Jake Scruggs (@jakescruggs) started us off with a bang, walking us through all the different aspects of metric_fu. Jake did a great job of explaining how to use metrics as a tool for where to focus your efforts in refactoring code, but explained that it’s not designed to be put in the hands of management – and probably not something you want to break the build-chain for.

John McCaffrey (@j_mccaffrey) kept the momentum going with some great tips for improving Rails performance. Some of the biggest tips: use indexes in your database, cache things when it’s practical, use sprites, and most importantly gzip your resources!

Finally, I gave my talk – first illustrating how easy it is to create your own Gems and release them to the public, and then talking about how dangerous it is that we can release those Gems so quickly. The slides can be found below:

I had to race back to Eau Claire after that, but it was an impressive conference. In addition to the standard talks, there was also a tutorial track, featuring Jeff Cohen and Noel Rappin discussing how to get started with Rails, and how to test a legacy environment, respectively.

Finally, there was a coding dojo hosted by the guys over at Obtiva (@ObtivaCorp) where attendees could drop in and practice pair programming, TDD, and learn about cool tech like Redis!

A big thanks to the ChicagoRuby group for hosting such a spectacular conference!

• Read more about RubyWorld Conf 2010

RubyWorld Conf 2010 was held in Matsue, the capital city of Shimane, Japan on Sept 6th and 7th. Matsue is a beautiful, small town that is only a 1 hour flight north-west of Tokyo. This was the second RubyWorld Conf and it was held in Matz's hometown both years. The theme for this year was the Ruby Ecosystem.

RubyWorld Conf is one of the two annual Ruby conferences in Japan, the other one being RubyKaigi. RubyKaigi is a four-day developer's conference, so the sessions are more technical and the attendees are mostly developers. RubyWorld Conf has a mix of both business and technical sessions, attracting around 1000 business people and developers from all around Japan.

Matsue is an agricultural city. At one time the city saw a growing construction sector, but that has since dried up due to the recent global economic slowdown. The city, like the country Japan, is trying to find ways to expand its economy. With support from the local government and universities, the city, with Matz's blessing, is positioning itself as the hub for Ruby and OSS. Many local government officials, computer science and economy students and professors attended the conference. The local government is making things easier to attract IT companies; local students with Ruby education and experience provide good technical resources; and professors are studying how to benefit from Open Source software.

The city is advertising itself as a great place for IT companies and aspiring to be the Bangalore of Japan. In addition to boasting favorable local resources and policies, the city is promoting its infrastructure as an advantage for IT companies, citing their ample supply of electricity (less than one hour of power outage in a year, which is much lower than that of the US which averages 70 hours, and significantly lower than that of China which averages 800 hours), and citing Japan's public transportation system which is the most punctuate in the world. The city is also touting itself as a great place to live with very friendly policies for women raising their children. Matz decided work and live here to bring up his four kids in the growing and beautiful city of Matsue.

Despite all those favorable conditions, there are some challenges for the city of Matsue and the Rubyists in Japan. Most of the Ruby and Rails books and resources are only in English, and they need to be translated into Japanese to help students to learn Ruby and Rails. Also, there are some hostile attitudes towards Rails which people claim is invading Japan, and some experienced Rubyists won't use Rails. The advice from the Ruby core team is to accept Rails rather than fight it. One of the reasons is that Rails can bring in money where Ruby hasn't been able to.

I attended the conference this year and presented Ruby and Machine Learning. In my presentation which was attended by Matz and Chad Fowler, I did a brief introduction to Machine Learning(ML), talked about the current state of Ruby and Machine Learning, surveyed the ML tools available today, and demonstrated Ruby code that uses ML. I also talked about and demonstrated tweetsentiments.com - an application that I developed using Ruby on Rails and Machine Learning to analyze the sentiments of tweets. Other presenters from overseas included world-renowned Chad Fowler, the co-founder/CTO of Animoto, Stevie Clifton, plus several people from Germany and Holland. The full speaker's list can be found here.

The conference was very well organized in a world-class venue, and each talk was simultaneously translated into English and Japanese in real time by experienced translators, so there was no problem understanding the native Japanese presenters. The conference was fun, educational, and good for networking. And I was able to experience the polite and friendly Japanese people and their culture, in addition to enjoying delicious food! Highly recommended. You can see additional photos here.

• Read more about Intridea Brings Kansas City Barbecue to Ruby Midwest

Ruby Midwest is an upcoming two-day, single track regional Ruby conference taking place in Kansas City on July 16 and 17. Today they announced their speaker list (including our own Michael Bleigh, a Kansas City native) and we’re happy to blog about our involvement with the conference. Intridea is sponsoring OMGWTFBBQ, a dinner at the conference hotel with Kansas City barbecue open to all attendees after the first day of the conference.

Catering will be provided by Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue (it’s delicious, trust us). So if you’re heading to the conference (with keynotes by Yehuda Katz of Engine Yard and Chris Wanstrath of GitHub) and you want to take a few hours, enjoy the best food Kansas City has to offer and socialize with your fellow Midwest Rubyists, RSVP for OMGWTFBBQ today!

More details will be announced as the conference draws near, but we’re looking forward to helping make Ruby Midwest’s first year a runaway success as a regional conference. See you in Kansas City!

• Read more about Hacking the Mid-End (Great Lakes Ruby Bash Edition)

I just finished giving my “Hacking the Mid-End” talk at the Great Lakes Ruby Bash. It was a bit longer format, so I updated the slides a bit and added a third example to the code. The slides are embedded below and the new code is available in the GitHub Repository.

I’m still at the conference, but I wanted to post up the slides and code immediately! Enjoy.