The FutureRuby conference has been (and still is, as of 11:43am on Sunday) wonderful. I just finished my talk on “Living With 1000 Open Source Projects” which was great fun, good for a bunch of laughs, and more importantly allowed me to share some thoughts on Zero Maintenance, Managing community expectations, self-sustaining communities, and the difficulty of scaling pet children.
Below are the slides and all the nice things people said about the talk, which has made me feel very good for sharing, and for the 60hr return flight from Brisbane to Toronto.
If you want to hear the jokes, and an Australian “mistaking” Canada for a state of America, perhaps wait for InfoQ to publish the video.
At recent conferences, other speakers have taken up an amusing new sport: ask Dr Nic to prove he’s a real doctor. Traditionally my reply is “I’m just not that clever to make it up.” Undeterred the personal challenges continued. At JAOO in Sydney and Brisbane (my home town) Glenn Vanderburg even challenged me to bring my thesis to the conference. I accepted this challenge but then promptly forgot.
Today I actually found the thing. It’s red. The colour of the binding was my only chance to impose some sense of personalisation.
The title was The Morphing Architecture: Runtime Evolution of Distribute Applications. The abstract is too long to be bothered reciting here. Succinctly, as best I remember it, it could be:
If you have distributed applications (components owned by multiple organisations) that run 24×7, and you need to upgrade behaviour, how the hell do you sequence the live upgrade?
Like most PhDs, it is a project of theoretical usefulness, but not significantly close to any commercial interests so that some large company doesn’t solve all your interesting problems before you get around to writing a 200 page thesis.
In 220+ pages, the only interesting parts (to me now) are from my Acknowledgments section:
As [my parent's] eldest of two sons, I am that person in each family who is the “first experiment in parenting.”
The Acknowledgements section ended with this:
And finally [thanks]…
To all the people who ever came up to me…
Asked me how my thesis was going…
Laughed hideously…
And ran off.
There are 5 sessions on at 11:35am on Tuesday the 18th of September, 2007, at Rails Conf Europe.
If you are unlucky enough to be one of those speakers, then I have pity for you.
I should know, I’m one of them, and I have pity for me.
So, I thought I should give a completely unbiased opinion about which of the five sessions you should attend, and which you should avoid like the plague.
Rails Full Text Search with Ferret
By Jens Krämer.
Jens is a German, so this conference is a home game for him. The room will be filled with local Germans all wearing their home strip, and will all be chanting and cheering in German throughout. I watched World Cup 2006 on the telly – that’s what they did then, and Jens’ talk will be no different I’m sure. You can’t learn anything with other people chanting and carrying on like its a football/soccer match.
Screenscraping as a Tool for Changing the (Legacy) World
By Jesper Rønn-Jensen and Mads Buus Westmark.
Jesper and Mads are Danes, from Denmark. A small European country who’s royal crown price recently married an Australian girl. Her father, Dr Donaldson, was my Calculus lecture in 2nd year university. He yelled at me once for talking in class. Whilst not directly Jesper and Mads’ fault, its something to keep in mind.
ActiveRecord and Service Data Objects: Adding New Data Models Beneath Your Rails Apps
By Doug Tidwell from IBM.
IBM is a large country off the coast of all tax-paying countries. Most likely in the Pacific Ocean, as its probably big enough for IBM. Whilst the session talk description is enterprise gobble-de-gook, it probably would be interesting, but I’ll summarise it for you: write specs for your underlying data layer and how they map to the #find and #save methods of ActiveRecord, and bob’s yer uncle.
3rd Partying Issues and Solutions
By Ryan Garver, ELC “Diamond Sponsor” Technologies.
There are three diamond sponsors for RailsConf – ThoughtWorks, Sun Microsystems and ELC. Diamond sponsors are a good thing. Sponsoring things is a good thing. I hope Dr Nic Academy will sponsor things in the future. I’ll talk to the owner about it.
Meta-Magic in Rails: Become a Master Magician
By Dr Nic Williams.
Dr Nic is Australian, so he has a funny slang accent that can be quite awkward to understand, especially when he starts talking very fast. Australia was cheated in World Cup 2006 by Italy who, with 10 seconds left in their round 2 map, dived in the box, got a penalty kick, scored, won the game and went on to win the World Cup. So, logically, if Australia hadn’t been cheated, we’d have won the World Cup instead.
Thusly reenacted here on YouTube:
Summary
11.35am on Tuesday might be a good time to grab a coffee, and talk to Chad Fowler about the shame of putting 5 awesome speakers on at the same time as each other.
