This past weekend I had the pleasure to attend a local conference, acts_as_conference. The conference was described as an event that was focused on Ruby on Rails, but it seemed to be much more focused on Ruby, with Rails in mind. Overall I think the conference was a great success at $100 a seat it was well worth the money.
If you want a full rundown you should head over to Brian LeGros’s blog as he did a write up on each talk. Max took a few pictures and put up some thoughts of his own, so if you want to get a British opinion go check there ;-).
I went looking forward to both Dan Benjamin’s and Obie Fernandez’s keynote and Charles Nutter’s JRuby talk. I was impressed to find all the quality content that came up, especially Smarticus (Bryan Liles), who I hadn’t heard about before this conference. He did a great presentation on BDD and what it really is, and how we are all doing it wrong. I found this especially refreshing because I am the ‘testing nazi’ at work and I have come to very similar conclusions that he did about TDD and BDD. At the very least he seemed to give some sort of credibility to my co-workers about the whole idea of test first and how it works.
If you didn’t get a chance to go this year I would encourage you to keep your heads up for next years event, because it is definitely worth it for all levels of ruby developers.