2015-09-13

Rubyconf TW

So these last 2 days we went to RubyConfTW here in Taipei, like every year. At that occasion I kinda forced my buddies to take part in this rant section. So, that occasion of meeting the ruby community was as usual very enjoyable. Year after year we see the same people, the community is solid and persistent.

Like last years Matz was here and he talked about ruby 3 and, that was a surprise to me, he talked about getting rid of the GIL very soon. That GIL topic has been a taboo for so many years. Getting rid off it can change the position of ruby in the family of the major scripting languages. He also defined laziness as one of the 3 required characteristics of a good coder. I’m not sure there is anything mainstream about those 3 qualities but for a long time I had my set of 3 requirements to evaluate a good coder and laziness was in it. maybe I will develop more about it in another rant.

During this conference I also had the occasion to hear a lot of direct feedback from friends of Green Ruby. For example we have an irc channel but many people are not that comfortable with that chat system from another century and would prefer a slack room. As a matter of fact we have such a room, but we forgot about it for the past year. It’s alive again, feel free to send a request for invite to news at greenruby.org to join http://greenruby.slack.com. It’s open to everybody.

Rubyconftw by xenor

Hey I’m xenor and this is my first rant in Green Ruby News about (and not about) rubyconftw.

I work in a ruby shop and manage a couple of people, and I am recently feeling burned-out. It affects motivation and productivity. I am in a position which involves watching over colleagues output. But I also have my own coding projects ongoing.

At first it’s great and challenging. But after half a year, it starts to bite me back. I get tired and anxious about not meeting my goal at the end of the day while checking others progress. I also need more breaks than usual. The typical burn-out syndrome.

Rubyconf gave me a break so that I can rethink what I was doing and how I can evaluate things around me. During the conference, I found some time to do side project. This really helps and re-motivates me on programming (I believe this could be called ‘Conference Driven Development’)

You might wonder why I didn’t say anything about the talks. Actually, talks are just as great as all other conferences, and can be watched on the recordings that they will post soon. But the most important part is really the atmosphere of encouragement to try and learn something new.

Rubyconftw by tysliu

Greetings. This is tysliu and this is also my first rant and my experience from going to 2015 Rubyconf TW.

The main benefit from attending rubyconf this year is that I said hello to more people. I met past colleagues and also new people. It feels nice to see familiar faces and catch up.

The most interesting talk for me this years was tenderlove’s talk. It was about how he attacked the issue of making Rails HTTP2 friendly. Basically, Rails at the moment is not http2 compatible. This is due the the current architecture of Rails and implementation of rack middlewares. During the talk he was able to demo a prototype Rails that is H2 friendly.

The best news for Rails developers is that there are plans to for making HTTP 2 compatibility available in Rails 5.

2015-09-06

Meet at rubyconf

Next friday we will be at rubyconf Taiwan. Last year there was around 300 attendees and there is 256 this year. But maybe there will be more last minute registration, there is still some spots available (well just 14 at this time). I will also be at the pre-conf evening on wednesday. Good time to meet if you are in Taiwan (we have 37 subscribers there).

Some stats on greenruby

From time to time I check an export of the subscribers list and do some stats out of curiosity. As of today there are 1466 subscribers, and more than half in the US (844) all the rest are in 88 other countries (most in India, UK, France and Taiwan, in that order). In the US most people are from New-York, just a little more than Los Angeles, and Monticello in Kentucky. I wonder what there is so special in that city of less than 10k people. Maybe that’s a geo-location glitch? If not, please someone tell me what there is in that small and probably nice city. But if I had to bet, I would put my money on the glitch.

Every week there is a small number of new subscribers, especially during summer. But if you don’t really read or if you don’t care that much, please unsubscribe. I will certainly have to do some invitation to unsubscribe when we will reach around 2000, because mailchimp if free of charge only under that limit.

There are also a lot of unaccounted subscribers to the RSS feed, which is the most popular page on the website. But I don’t use feedburner or any kind of tracking so I don’t really know. And I kind of like it that way.

2015-08-02

RubyConf Taiwan 2015

In September 11 and 12 there is a Rubyconf here in Taiwan. I have been at some past editions and it’s always a good time to meet people. Because we are close to Japan there is usually pretty good ruby core contributors from there. We get to see Matz, father of ruby, at each edition. But this time it seems that the organizers pulled some kind of special trick and the famous Aaron Patterson will be present. And I remember having heard Sarah Allen on rubyrogues last year, it is the first time she joins us in Taiwan too. I think both of them will bring some unique taste to this years rubyconf.

If you looked for an occasion to visit Taiwan, that may be the right time. You won’t regret it. The ruby community in Taiwan is quite active and Taiwanese people are amazingly welcoming to westerners.

And, if you want to meet the 3 of us, we will all be there. Look around for Xenor and Tysliu, the famous editors of the Green Ruby newsletter. They tirelessly collect links and news, fresh from the week, about ruby and other things. And if you see someone with a Gandi T-Shirt, that will probably be me. We probably will distribute some green ruby stickers that I still have in stock. So then we can make new ones.

2015-07-19

RubyConf Taiwan 2015 CFP

Hey it’s time to give it a try, talking at a rubyconf is a great upgrade for any coder. That rubyconf will happen on september 11-12th in Taipei. Check it out.

NSA on Github

Looks like someone is trying to fight back a reputation of obscurity. While they are still pushing on more invasion of privacy, they also release some open source code. Check the NSA github repository, they released something already. Simp especially has a bunch of puppet modules, but it’s designed only for redhat kind of systems. Quite an interesting move.

2012-12-10

RubyConf 2012

Ruby Conf Taiwan 2012. Quite a great event.

http://rubyconf.tw/2012/