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I’m proud to be talking about Leveraging the Cloud with Ruby at the Ruby Hoedown this coming August. Ruby Hoedown is a regional Ruby conference held this year in Huntsville, Alabama. There is a great lineup of speakers and it should be a great time.

I’ll be discussing cloud computing and showing rich code examples of how Ruby developers can use services such as Amazon Web Services to build highly scalable applications. Do you want to see something specific? If you’re attending Ruby Hoedown and would like to see something in particular leave a comment here. Register for the Ruby Hoedown today and I’ll see you in August!

The second half of day two at the Hoedown brought BOF’s (birds of a feather) during lunch time. I was in on a great BOF on getting the Ruby community to help out the community in general. The result - Ruby for Change. The purpose of Ruby for Change is to organize the Ruby/Rails-community to create driven projects to benefit real people. This is very cool and something that Rails For All is definitely going to be helping with. The BOF sessions were followed by a talk by Ken Auer titled “Does Ruby Have a Chasm to Cross?” This was a very interesting talk about the death of Smalltalk, and how Ruby can avoid the same mistakes. Long story short, the long tail that Ruby currently inhabits is not enough to sustain it long term and cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority (the “chasm”). This was an interesting talk and one which we will discuss here in posts to come. The final session was “Using C to Tune Your Ruby (or Rails) Application” by Jared Richardson. Another great talk which showed how easy it is to speed up Ruby and Rails apps by integrating C into your application.

The final keynote was a discussion on beauty by Marcel Molina. To summarize, there are three principles of beauty - proportion, integrity, and clarity. This was a thought provoking talk which is best left to you all to see.

One thing of beauty is that the speakers and the presentations were recorded and are being released under a creative commons license, and will be available here soon.

The entire conference was fantastic and well put together. Major props go out to Nathaniel Talbot and Jeremy McAnally for bringing everything together. We were definitely inspired.

Look for a Rails-centric conference to be announced within a month or two for the Orlando area, brought to you by Rails For All.

The Ruby Hoedown had a great second day of talks starting with “Building Games with Ruby” by Andrea O.K. Wright. I hope that she posts her slides as there are more links to libraries that help with Ruby game development than I can mention here. Ruby is so flexible and multi-purpose. Next up were a series of lighting talks, a few of which discussed testing. One lesson (that seems to come up over and over again especially when talking about scalability and performance) is don’t hit the database for your tests. Dan Manges from ThoughWorks had some very interesting material on the subject - check out his blog for more.

The second half of today at Ruby Hoedown brought a great talk and a great key note.

Jay Phillips discussed Adhearsion, a Ruby Gem that he created that allows for the integration of VoIP into Ruby apps. Anhearsion currently works with Asterisk, an open source PBX (telephone system) from Digium. It was a great talk and useful for us, as we are working with a client to move their existing PHP interface to Asterisk to Ruby.

Bruce Tate did the day’s key note. A few of his main points that stuck with me are:

• Beauty takes you to the visionaries, but you have to take it to the masses
• There is a big chasm between visionaries and early adopters, and they like to come in groups

What gets you from the visionaries to the early adopters is solving the killer business problem. What is that you ask? Simple. Java development takes too long. In the same slide he also said that beauty alone is not sufficient. Was he referring to the speed issues that Ezra discussed in his Merb discussion (and I am reminded came up at Railsconf)? Perhaps. I’ll ask him for some clarification tomorrow and let you know what he says.

Funniest things I heard Bruce say today: ?¢‚Ǩ?ìShe can kill me with a sword. A business user that I want to keep happy,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù and ?¢‚Ǩ?ìJava didn’t start out as something that sucked, it became something that sucked.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù Classic.

This morning at the Hoedown Chad Fowler, Marcel Molina and Bruce Tate did a great charity presentation on Ruby testing that raised almost $3000 from the Hoedowners. They discussed unit and functional testing, glanced over rspec (they don’t use it but it looks nice), and rcov, which we at ADS use to show clients how much of the code is covered by tests. They also introduced us to mocking and stubbing. Don’t know what that is? Neither did I really until this morning. Read Martin Fowler’s discussion on what each of these are and the differences between the two. Marcel and Chad also showed us how to use flexmock, which makes mocking and stubbing (rather) easy.

An interesting happening at the charity session was the slightly different approaches to testing of Chad and Marcel. It just goes to show that there are many ways to approach a problem, and even the people that we see at the top can do it differently.

I had a chance to talk with Bruce Tate about testing and Rails. He backed up what others have said - testing will speed up the coding process. He and I also talked about his charity site - Changing the Present. There is a growing movement in the Ruby/Rails community to give back not only to the community itself but to the communities in which we live. Look for Rails For All and Changing the Present to start working together soon.

The first presentation of the day was by Ezra Zygmuntowicz on Merb (which he created). Merb is a “lightweight MVC Ruby app server” that delivers high performance for dynamic pages. One popular use of Merb is for uploads/downloads. By using Merb for these functions, you can keep your UI snappy and not tie up Mongrel processes for (potentially) lengthy file uploads. Ezra repeatedly said that his intent is to keep the core of Merb small and hackable, and easily extendable using plugins. Great stuff.

Those of us that got in to Raleigh early yesterday for the Ruby Hoedown got together at the Raleigh Flying Saucer. Even though the AC was broken (and the outside temp was 102), we stuck it out in the interest of camaraderie. This gave me a chance to meet Jeremy McNally and Nathaniel Talbot, the two guys who coordinated this conference. They are both great guys and super easy to get along with. We all (there were more in attendance than the three of us) had a lot to talk about, and not just Ruby talk mind you. Needless to say, I picked their brain and got a lot of great ideas for a (possible) conference in Orlando. Florida is nice in the Spring…

Soon, the fun begins. Can’t wait to see the digs at Red Hat.