RubyRX Recap

Hypothetical Labs - kevin - March 03, 2009

I attended RubyRX a couple of weeks back. Conference attendance was a bit light — I blame sour economic conditions — but enthusiasm was high.

I gave two talks on Erlang. My first talk, covering the basics of Erlang and showing off some language features, was extremely well received. Lots of attendees and lots of interested questions. I was a bit worried about filling a 90 minute session but high audience participation soon put that fear to rest.

The second talk, highlighting how to use Erlang in a web setting, was a bit rockier. The audience was a mix or people who had seen my first talk and people who were completely new to the language. This situation made it a challenge to cover new information without leaving large parts of the audience in the metaphorical dust.

Audience participation was lower than my first talk, too. I’m not sure if lower participation levels was due to the relative poorness of the talk or just that people were getting tired on the second day of the conference. I’m definitely going to tune up this talk before I give it again next month.

Aside from my talks, the most interesting thing I saw at the conference was the continuation of a pattern I first saw at CodeMash 2009 in January. There’s a groundswell of interest in functional programming. I attended Stuart Holloway’s talks on Clojure and his talks were as well attended as mine. I think people are beginning to understand how hairy it will be to deal with concurrency issues using mainstream languages and techniques.

All in all, I enjoyed RubyRX as an attendee and a speaker. Even though the conference was smaller than some others I learned a few new things and had some interesting conversations which is what I look for in a conference.

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