[PLUG] [Event Report] RubyConf India, March 24-25, 2012, Pune, India

[Shakthi Kannan]

Hi,

I attended and also gave a lightning talk at RubyConf India 2012 [1]
at the Hyatt Regency, Pune [2], Maharashtra, India between March
24-25, 2012.

Day I

The keynote was delivered by Charles Oliver Nutter [3] on JRuby, and
Ruby virtual machines. This was followed by the recorded video keynote
by Yukihiro Matsumoto [4] on Ruby, its history, and his focus on Ruby
for embedded and scientific computing for the next couple of years.
mruby for embedded systems will be an interesting project to look
forward to this summer.

I then attended the talk on "Using Ruby to Craft and Test Beautiful
Command Line Applications" by Nikhil Mungel and Shishir Das, who gave
useful examples on how to construct meaningful and helpful command
line tools. Abhishek Parolkar [5], founder of BigData.sg, spoke on
available Ruby tools, and architectures for processing large volumes
of data in the "Ruby for the soul of Big Data nerds" talk.

Post lunch, I attended the session on "Responsive Design: now 90%
easier with SASS!" by Arpan CJ, who also designed the RubyConf India
2012 website. He explained how Sass [6] is useful in creating web
sites that can be quickly made to fit different display dimensions and
resolutions across phones, tablets, and PCs.

Steven Deobald [7] presented on "Clojure is my favourite ruby". He
gave wonderful programming construct examples for Ruby and Clojure,
and why he enjoyed Clojure more than Ruby. For the last talk of the
day, I attended Sandip Ransing and Shailesh Patil's talk on "VoIP on
Rails in India" where they had developed a call centre Rails front-end
application that uses Adhearsion [8]. They have an internal LAN setup
for call centres: Rails application -> Adhearsion -> Asterisk -> PRI
(Primary Rate Interface) -> PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

There were quite a number of lightning talks at the end of the day.
One from flipkart.com, where they mentioned that they use a service
oriented architecture with JSON over HTTP, along with RabbitMQ,
Padrino and JRuby.

Day II

The second day began with a keynote by Mikel Lindsaar [9] on "How to
win", where he emphasized on defining a purpose/reason to do anything
and everything. Chang Sau Sheong [10] presented on using Ruby and R
tools for doing population simulation in his "Sex, Money and Evolution
- Simulation and Data Analysis with Ruby and R" talk. Niranjan
Prabhakar Sarade gave an overview of the internal data structures
present in the Ruby MRI virtual machine source code in the "What lies
beneath the beautiful code?" talk.

After lunch, I attended the "Smells and patterns in test/spec code"
talk by Sidu Ponnappa and Aninda Kundu where they discussed the
different patterns and smells of test driven code, and their
implications. Karunakar presented on "Large scale Ruby project,
challenges and Pitfalls", sharing his experience on managing and
maintaining large scale Ruby projects. For the last talk of the day, I
attended Matthew Kirk's [11] talk on "'method_missing' Should be
Missing" where he talked about the overuse of method_missing, "monkey
patching", and eval from his experience.

Lightning talks were scheduled for the second day as well, and I was
happy to present "nursery_rhymes.rb" [12]. Few photos taken during the
event are available in my /gallery:

  http://www.shakthimaan.com/Mambo/gallery/album78

SK

[1] RubyConf India 2012. http://rubyconfindia.org/

[2] Hyatt Regency, Pune.
http://pune.regency.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/index.jsp?null

[3] Charles Oliver Nutter. http://blog.headius.com/

[4] Yukihiro Matsumoto. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto

[5] Abhishek Parolkar. http://parolkar.com/

[6] Sass. http://sass-lang.com/

[7] Steven Deobald. http://blog.deobald.ca/

[8] Adhearsion. http://adhearsion.com/

[9] Mikel Lindsaar. http://lindsaar.net/

[10] Chang Sau Sheong. http://blog.saush.com/

[11] Matthew Kirk. http://matthewkirk.com/

[12] nursery_rhymes.rb. http://shakthimaan.com/downloads.html#nursery-rhymes-rb

-- 
Shakthi Kannan
http://www.shakthimaan.com