RailsWayCon

I recently got out the comfort zone to present at a tech conference, RailsWayCon for the first time.Public speaking being somewhat nerve-wracking for most, especially given most developers are borderline autistic, things went relatively smoothly.

Here follows a quick rundown of each talk as well as embedded slides.Source code and slides have also been made available on my Github account.

Embracing Events

An in depth overview of Event-driven Programming and how the Operating System can help with that.Topics touched upon include :

• Context Switches ( Threads vs Fibers )
• Scheduling ( Cooperative vs Preemptive )
• Programming Models ( Evented vs Batched )
• Frameworks ( Eventmachine + Neverblock )
• Operating System nofication ( Signals + POSIX realtime )
• Practices from Online Gaming ( Project Darkstar )
• Testing Event-driven Code

Perhaps touching on gaming at a Rails conf was inappropriate, but I foresee significant production use of small mountable apps around core Rails infrastructure in the near future.Lightweight processes are no different than tasklets.

I’m looking to spend some time in the coming weeks on the JRuby wrap of the Project Darkstar Server module and hope that’ll at the very least inspire similar projects and advocate production use of JRuby.

Special thanks to Muhammed Ali for the last minute diagrams.

Inside Matz Ruby

Very much challenged by a lack of time ( 20 minutes !!! ) one had to touch on a handful of interesting concepts, but it sort of came together as a “patched” ( pun intended ) talk jumping from class representations to threading to gc.

As per suggestion from wycats, watch out for a series of “play along at home” posts that focus on the MRI interpreter.To raise the game, I’ll try my best to have them VM agnostic ( 1.8 and 1.9 ).

Thank You’s

It’s been a great week – no fuzz, no drama.Lotta coffee, little sleep, lotta code.I’d like to take a moment and reflect on the hospitality of the following individuals / companies, in addition to the RailsWayCon team.

Mathias Meyer and Jonathan Weiss

Recommendations for meals, coffee, transport, being loony and making time available from busy schedules, and families.The definite deployment and scaling experts through Peritor, do watch out for a unique EC2 product to be launched soon.

Alex, Thilo && Jan at Upstream Agile

Great office space for co-working and an ample supply of Club-Mate.Alex and Thilo recently built DoingText and Jan’s working on a stealth Couch DB project.

Sven Fuchs && Clemens Kofler

Localization and i18n experts.When not co-working with Clemens and the 90 dB his macbook fan emits, Sven specializes in dancing after 02:30am.