Why do you care about Ruby Manor?
We're interested in what you are hoping to get out of Ruby Manor, so that we - and that's everyone else, from speakers to other attendees - can help you achieve that.
Here's a sampling:
Tim Harding:I work by myself on a few Rails websites I've created with my (non-technical) business partner. I look forward to catching up with other programmers and learn stuff and see what I can contribute.
What interests me?
Programming. Ruby. Building businesses that scale.
What doesn't interest me?
"Agile".
Ed Davey:I use Ruby most days at work so I'm interested in practical stuff which I can use to solve real problems in better ways. However, I'm also interested in things which are abstract, philosophical, theoretical, whimsical or plain pointless if they are presented in an engaging way.
So, I'm in favour of diversity.
Specific things I'd like to know more about at the moment:
1) current best practices for testing javascript in web apps - currently I'm finding capybara-webkit is best;
2) commissioning servers and deploying apps using Micro Cloud Foundry. I missed the LRUG about Chef and Puppet so maybe this was discussed then.
3) how to get half-decent performance from Rails 3.1 / Ruby 1.9.2
That's all I can think of right now...
Paul Battley:I want to learn; to see people doing things I'd never have thought of and new ways of doing them; to share some of the things I've picked up along the way in my Ruby programming career; to enjoy the society of my fellow Rubyists – my friends.
Ben Griffiths:Once upon a time, I guess, before the internet, conferences were one of the best ways to spread ideas. Not sure that holds any more.
Now there are keynotes from famous folk who'll talk down to you or try to rally you or blame you for something or just bore the hell out of you. Can do without those.
Or the dreaded sponsor-talk.
Or that odd speakers-lounge separation between speakers and the mere mortals.
And you've paid hundreds of pounds to be in this faceless hotel with shitty wifi, before travel costs.
And you need the wifi because the information coming at you is only occupying 10% of your brain because the slides are very nice but say nothing, shoutily.
And you're just not taken in by that racket any more...
I love Ruby Manor for being different from all these - engaging, haphazard, quirky, honest, cheap and near to home and organised by friends.
Nick Ludlam:CTO at BERG, long time Ruby and 'media' hacker. I've done a fair amount of Mac OS X and iOS coding, and have become a huge fan of MacRuby. This is now my go-to tool for knocking up desktop applications.
Interested in finding out where the boundaries of the Ruby world are, and what new territories are being defined. Not so interested in testing frameworks for Rails.
Jamie Mill:I've only scratched the surface of Ruby until now, so pretty much anything on offer will be useful and interesting to me.
Really looking forward to learning, chatting and being challenged.
javier ramirez:I like community driven events. They have never failed me in meeting interesting people with fresh points of view, often pretty far away from THE ONE and official vision.
For some reason I never made it to Ru3y Manor before, and it's the high time to fix that.
If you want to know more about me, just keep reading
I've been doing web development for a while, and working with Ruby -on Rails mainly- for the last 5 years at aspgems.com.
I recently moved to London from Madrid, where you probably met me if you went to any of the Spanish Rails Conference editions, since I was speaking in all of them.
If you happened to be in EuRuKo 2009, the talk about programming games with Gosu? that was me
And if you were THE person who bought A copy of my book "Aptana RadRails: An IDE for Rails development", big thanks!!!
If you want to get in touch... http://javier-ramirez.com
James Mead:I want to learn more about Ruby from smart people in a friendly environment without any of the crap that happens at more commercially oriented conferences.
I want some say in which talks get selected and some means of shaping those talks so they are more interesting and relevant to me.
Tom Armitage:I used to write a lot of Ruby. I now write a bit less, and more of it happens in my spare time. I've not been to LRUG for a year or two now.
I'm not a trained computer scientist; I'm a pragmatic technologist at best. Good at making memory leaks and slow code.
Why am I going to RM? Because I like the community, I want to have my brain tickled with code for a day, and brush up some of my chops. Also, I love hearing Ben Griffiths talk about programming.
Tom Taylor:Less testing frameworks, more bat shit mental. Also: Ruby as a polyglot's tool: what can be learnt from other languages and frameworks.
Richard Taylor:I'm looking to learn what crazy things people have been up to with Ruby in the last year.
Adam Johnson:I don't want a tutorial on a framework about buzzword, I want a mind expanding talk on how you can/did do something unusual, interesting or unexpected.
seanohalpin:I'm a Senior Software Engineer in BBC R&D Prototyping.
I want to see people doing interesting things with Ruby, to learn from my peers and meet up with fellow Rubyists.
I'm hoping we get a mix of quirky talks and solid educational ones. Best of all would be both quirky and educational.
I'm not interested in opinion pieces or testing frameworks.
Andy Pike:I'm pretty new to Ruby after coming from a .NET background so really looking to learn as much as I can and meet some cool people.
Pat Allan:What I want from Ruby Manor is to learn and share. I'd particularly love to see people talk about better ways of testing (Ruby and Rails), and listen to philosophical wanderings on other languages and/or the Ruby community.
Jesper Kjeldgaard:I am from Denmark and moved to London to study a masters degree. Having delved in Ruby for the last year or so, I am still learning new things every day, which is one of the reasons it is so exciting.
I like reading about the language and find topics such as productivity, best-practices, design patterns, concurrency and rails especially interesting.
Oh, don't go to Denmark! It's being ruled by evil .NET overlords!
Chris O'Sullivan:I'm a Ruby (Rails?!) developer working at Harmonypark.
For me, get-togethers like this are less about the 'talks' and more about chatting with other like-minded individuals.
If you're going to do a talk for Ruby Manor, please:
- practice it in front of a friend
- make it short and punchy
- have a point!
- make it fun
- know when to shuddup
I'm a big fan of the non-technical talks - i.e. better communication, 'the life of the programmer' etc
Some great examples from this years Scottish Ruby Conference are:
Software Engineering: http://confreaks.net/videos/550-scotlandruby2011-real-software-engineering
Literary criticism for the idle programmer: http://confreaks.net/videos/548-scotlandruby2011-literary-criticism-for-the-idle-programmer
pixelblend:I think the best talks from previous manors have been from the fringes of the Ruby world, or about softer programming skills. It would be fantastic to get more of that this time around.
I'd rather not hear about web apps, testing frameworks or your scalability war stories.
Tom Stuart:I'm hoping to hear a wide range of perspectives on Ruby the language and Ruby the ecosystem, especially any talks that reflect on a transition I feel has taken place in our community toward viewing Ruby and Rails as mature and stable and viewing other languages as fresh and exciting.
Matt Smith:As a budding Rubyist it's fair to say I've got a broad interest because I've still got lots left to learn!
With that said, I'm most excited about the following:
- Recommendation systems
- Concurrent / distributed systems
- Anything vaguely AI related (genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, neural networks etc.)
- Uses of Ruby away from Rails (Rails is cool and everything, but I think Ruby's got so much appeal beyond just that).
Cheers very much!
Joe Corcoran:I don't want to hear about: Not Invented Here projects; general Rails stuff that I can read about in numerous blog posts.
I want to hear about: the obscure bits of Ruby that we hardly ever use; the other languages/tools Rubyists use and why; the fun but pointless code acrobatics people get up to when they're off the clock; mathematics nerds being mathematics nerds; anything I've never heard of before.
Chris McGrath:I'm looking to say hi to some people I haven't seen in a while (and only really see at conferences). I'm working on a new app for handling translations using the i18n gem, so devs/translators can avoid having to hand edit yaml. If you're doing (or have done) multilingual sites I'd love to chat to you and and see if what we're making is going to be useful. I also want to chat about OO design and Rails and try and find some inspiration to break out of problems I'm seeing.
Paul Wright:I attended the first Ruby Manor in 2008 and it was a joyous event.
I'm looking for topics that aren't obviously practical but instead thought provoking and varied.
Tim Cowlishaw:I'm generally interested in anything anyone has to offer, I think! In particular though, anything at all to do with any of the following would be especially awesome:
JRuby (particularly war stories involving integrating ruby in a polyglot JVM-based system, massively enthusiastic support should you have experience using JRuby with Hadoop and/or Mahout)
Concurrency / distributed computing with Ruby
Machine learning / collaborative filtering / recommendations / NLP
Any interesting Ruby stuff that's not "on Rails"! (Nothing against rails, but it's good to hear about what else is going on in the Ruby world).
Wonkish mathsy / functional programming stuff of all varieties.
Thanks!
Aanand Prasad:I devour programming languages, but Ruby devoured me back. What's more, I also have an insatiable appetite for smart people saying smart things, and the London Ruby community is full of those! I can only dream of what a full day of them doing that in a room would be like. Well, or I could go to Ruby Manor.
Yes please: Code. Weird code. Fun code. Talks about Unix and other things we use all the time but hardly bother to understand. Things people have made that are fun or clever or strange or illegal.
No thanks: Getting up and running with Redis. Introduction to EventMachine. Scaling Rails.
digitalronin:What Tom Stuart & Sean O'Halpin said.
Eleanor McHugh:On reflection I'm mostly looking for beer, gossip and some inspiration. Anything beyond that's a definite win.
Maleghast:I'm a veteran web developer (well I've been at it over ten years) and I am in the process of broadening my horizons properly to Ruby. In short I have fallen for Ruby like a blind roofer, and I am looking for any and all opportunities to learn from others and grow the precious little green shoots of this new skill which is currently giving me so much pleasure.
I am interested in Ruby in the Rails paradigm, as a Web Development tool, and I am also very interested in Ruby as a Test tool; I am getting a lot of value out of Cucumber both at work and at home, and I love the accessibility of Test::Unit compared to my previous experiences of Unit Test frameworks / approaches.
What I particularly want to learn is how to "think Ruby", so that as my skills and use grow I can focus on creating elegant and maintainable code in the Ruby idiom, rather than attempting to write code in the context of old habits, while simply using Ruby syntax.
Kenneth Lee:Anything that uses Ruby instead of some older/standard/de-facto/dinosaur of tool that kicks ass and makes my life easier.
Going beyond the boundaries of what we typically use Ruby for.
Patrick Sinclair:I'm a developer at the BBC working on the Radio and Music product, where I get to both maintain some legacy Ruby apps as well as do some heavy lifting prototyping mostly using Sinatra.
The most memorable Ruby Manor talks for me have been about some of the more visual uses of Ruby, e.g. GUIs and Processing.
What would be useful for me is to learn about libraries and tools people are using for rapid prototyping work.
Mari :I love this kind of community/love driven events. I like to think that the people involved are as passionate about programming as I am and have a lot of hidden treasures for people like me.
I like Ruby, being a developer and sharing my time learning from/ discussing with really amazing rubyists. And definitely Ruby Manor is full of these ;)
So count me in!
Steve Hayes:Fairly new Rails developer, I have a completely different day job, Rails for me is relief from the grief!
Andrew Nesbitt:After working with rails for 5 years I'm interested in learning about different approaches to developing web applications, I've been using node.js quite a bit recently as well and am curious to see if it's possible to do similar style apps in ruby.
Paul Fedory:I'm looking to learn more about Ruby in general! After attending a few conferences now with too many high-level talks, I'm interested in the nitty-gritty, that is, more specific talks with code samples.
Guillermo:Product entusiast. From the front to the back. I love clean code, clean infraestructure, and clean front.
Work in spain for so many years, and now I move to Berlin to work as a Backend guy for wooga.
I made a few rails plugins, rubygems, tools, rails commits.
The things i more interested are the things that can't be explained in a README or a blog post, and are related with technologic.
Year by year, i prefer for philosophical speaks, than technical, just because currently, the technical part could be solved easily.
Phil Nash:Like in any conference I'd like to see things about Ruby and programming that I didn't know or that I'd heard about before but get to see in more depth. Given the nature of the Manor, I would also like to get more into the Ruby community.
Joseph Wilk:Testing. More Testing. Yes more testing.
JayGreasley:Like Steve Hayes, I am fairly new to Ruby. My 'day job ' is heavily Microsoft based sadly. I'm web centric so anything around Sinatra, Rails and related frameworks is interesting but may be a bit familiar to the majority. Open data interests me. Also, I am interested in hack days like GoodForNothing, I wonder if someone who has participated in one might share how Ruby was used on one, the process they went through etc.
steve_hook:I've been learning Ruby on and off for a few years as a welcome distraction from my day job as a .NET developer and its given me a fresh perspective on how software should be built. None of my current colleagues are Ruby developers, so I want to learn more about how experienced Rubyists work and pick up some practical tips, tricks and new ideas.
In particular I'm interested in the tools I should be using to become a more productive Ruby developer and the design problems that others are facing in real-life applications. Hard to say what I don't want to hear about, pretty much any of the proposed talks would be informative at my level.
Luke Stutters:I work for a company that has two Ruby products and I want to learn more about what can be done with Ruby.
Nasir Jamal:Meetups/conferences like these are so convenient as they are on a weekend and economical (I wont say cheap) which means I do not have to get it authorized from work, it just needs grabbing a ticket and keeping the weekend free :)
I am expecting to meet some interesting people and find out new and/or better ways of doing things.
Tom Stuart:I want to spend a day hearing surprising things about a language I use every day. I am in danger of becoming stuck in my ways. An ideal talk would be one that took me somewhere a bit unexpected, made me think in new ways, and initiated that little chemical reaction in my brain that culminates in a fresh idea.
I want everyone to feel that they got the conference they expected and deserved. In a good way.
Abdel A Saleh:Learn a ton stuff from the Ruby fringes. More mainstream Ruby learning is easy to pick up these days - there's a Gem for everything, but crazy hacks that peeps have attempted are always a pleasure :)
Kerry Buckley:I'm hoping to see an eclectic selection of interesting and useful talks, just like I did at the first two Manors. I'd like to be introduced to tools I didn't know I needed, and techniques I'll wonder how I lived without. And I want to hear at least one really good rant.
I'd be happy to talk about something myself, but I don't think there's really anything especially interesting I know enough about to take up people's time.
Rob:It's been great to see the growth of London's Ruby community in the five years since we started LRUG. I was one of the LRUG instigators, leading the meetings in 2005-2006 before Murray took over that responsibility.
Someone's asked me to give a talk about "Scraping Open Data" at Ruby Manor 3 http://vestibule.rubymanor.org/proposals/12 - something I've done a lot of in the last few years. I'm happy to present some screen scraping techniques I've used to scrape government data, and approaches to (lower-case 's') semantic entity matching.
Look forward to learning on the day what other wonderful uses people have found for Ruby - and techniques they've developed along the way.
Volker Pacher:As it will be my first time at RubyManor I expect it to be totally like magic and that we will solve all the words problems with a collective flick of our macbooks.
Failing that, meeting interesting people and horizon expanding discussions will do.
Harry Rickards:I'm a student (15, 16 by Ruby Manor), so my use of Ruby is pretty much just for fun. Having tried quite a few languages (am ashamed to say I first learnt Java), I can confidently say Ruby is much nicer to the developer than any other I've tried. For tiny little web apps I prefer Sinatra, but for most I think Rails is awesome (ActiveSupport::Inflector not only has a great name, but is really useful).
I'd like to learn more about Ruby - pretty much anything will satisfy me! My particular interest is open data, but I'm also interested in anything mathsy or to do with visualisation of data. A talk on all the mistakes I'm making with Ruby/Rails would also probably be helpful.
It sounds like Ruby Manor will be a really great day and after all, who can't love a crowdsourced conference? :)
Chris Lowis:I'm a research engineer at BBC R&D.
At the last Manor I spoke about drawing pretty plots with Ruby, I've also given talks on R and Ruby.
I'd be interested to hear about people doing fun things with ruby, tools to improve daily work and insights into programming paradigms from clever rubyists. Talks I've enjoyed in the past (at the Manor or LRUG) have been Jame's Coglan's Scheme interpreter talk, Sean O'Halpin's talk on metaprogramming, Tom Stuart's talk on functional programming and Jase Cale's talk on Live coding/Processing with Ruby.
I'm less interested in talks about Rails and Testing. Unless the testing talk is by James Adam.
Richard Drake:I want to meet the London Ruby community. I'm interested in lots of things.
Here's my feedback on the Vestibule app. It's great. I mean that. Its simplicity is of course key. However I'd add the following. (Is it open source? Ah yes, found it on GitHub. I've duly forked and will have a tinker along the following lines.)
Adding some wiki-ness, as follows. In the three places you can add text - account page, proposal, suggestion - you are able to link to people or proposal using [[Paul Battley]] or [[What's in your irbrc?]]. If you create a link to something that's not already there like [[Pry]] you are taken to be suggesting a new session but not necessarily to be run by you. You can make that clear in the text for the page (which will be a new proposal page). This means that proposal pages (the left hand side) should be able to be edited by more than one person, at least in some cases. (Want to play with this in code before committing.) I'd rely on social pressure rather than techno wizardry to prevent abuse of this openness, in the Ward Cunningham style. So no history. "Trust me, I'm a Rubyist."
So Paul would say in a comment: I'd like to see a session on [[Pry]]. If anyone really agrees they can create the page (proposal). Their name appears at the bottom as proposer but that is no longer taken to mean that they are determined or even willing to lead the session. Presumably they would, given a fair wind, want to turn up!
How does that sound? This year or next? When I've tinkered others cleverer than me can decide.
James Adam:I'm interested in getting people to contribute ideas, time and energy to the community, so that Ruby doesn't become yet another soulless wage-language.
Murray Steele:For me Ruby Manor is two-fold; there's stuff I want as an organiser and stuff I want as an attendee.
As an organiser I want to make sure there's a great one-day conference about ruby. I want to make sure that people have a venue for letting others know about the programming language they love.
As an attendee, although my day-to-day ruby is rails based, and any talks on rails, or the rails ecosystem will probably be very useful, that doesn't mean that's all I want to hear about. I'm interested in the esoteric, weird, fun stuff. Basically I want the Manor to be full of the ruby equivalent of the Under The Pier Show
Andrew McDonough:I'd be interested in talks about the design of ruby applications, e.g. patterns, extracting code into objects, refactoring. I'm also interested in testing patterns. I'm less interested in talks about particular gems.