I attended and also gave a lightning talk at RubyConf India 2012 at the Hyatt Regency, Pune, Maharashtra, India between March 24-25, 2012.
Day I
The keynote was delivered by Charles Oliver Nutter on JRuby, and Ruby virtual machines. This was followed by the recorded video keynote by Yukihiro Matsumoto on Ruby, its history, and his focus on Ruby for embedded and scientific computing for the next couple of years. mruby for embedded systems will be an interesting project to look forward to this summer.
I then attended the talk on “Using Ruby to Craft and Test Beautiful Command Line Applications” by Nikhil Mungel and Shishir Das, who gave useful examples on how to construct meaningful and helpful command line tools. Abhishek Parolkar, founder of BigData.sg, spoke on available Ruby tools, and architectures for processing large volumes of data in the “Ruby for the soul of Big Data nerds” talk.
Post lunch, I attended the session on “Responsive Design: now 90% easier with SASS!” by Arpan CJ, who also designed the RubyConf India 2012 website. He explained how Sass is useful in creating websites that can be quickly made to fit different display dimensions and resolutions across phones, tablets, and PCs.
Steven Deobald presented on “Clojure is my favourite ruby”. He gave wonderful programming construct examples for Ruby and Clojure, and why he enjoyed Clojure more than Ruby. For the last talk of the day, I attended Sandip Ransing and Shailesh Patil’s talk on “VoIP on Rails in India” where they had developed a call centre Rails front-end application that uses Adhearsion. They have an internal LAN setup for call centres: Rails application -> Adhearsion -> Asterisk -> PRI (Primary Rate Interface) -> PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).
There were quite a number of lightning talks at the end of the day. One from flipkart.com, where they mentioned that they use a service oriented architecture with JSON over HTTP, along with RabbitMQ, Padrino and JRuby.
Day II
The second day began with a keynote by Mikel Lindsaar on “How to win”, where he emphasized on defining a purpose/reason to do anything and everything. Chang Sau Sheong presented on using Ruby and R tools for doing population simulation in his “Sex, Money and Evolution - Simulation and Data Analysis with Ruby and R” talk. Niranjan Prabhakar Sarade gave an overview of the internal data structures present in the Ruby MRI virtual machine source code in the “What lies beneath the beautiful code?” talk.
After lunch, I attended the “Smells and patterns in test/spec code” talk by Sidu Ponnappa and Aninda Kundu where they discussed the different patterns and smells of test driven code, and their implications. Karunakar presented on “Large scale Ruby project, challenges and Pitfalls”, sharing his experience on managing and maintaining large scale Ruby projects. For the last talk of the day, I attended Matthew Kirk’s talk on “‘method_missing’ Should be Missing” where he talked about the overuse of method_missing, “monkey patching”, and eval from his experience.
Lightning talks were scheduled for the second day as well, and I was happy to present nursery_rhymes.rb. Few photos taken during the event are available in my /gallery.