Friday: Evening Keynotes

Steve Smith

• is rails ready for the enterprise? or is the enterprise ready for rails?
• “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” -Mohandas Gandhi
• “We will be tracking rails closely because it may represent a historic tipping point in development environments.” -Dr Dobbs Journal
• Who is using rails: BMW, Vonage, USDA, Cisco, Verisign, Deptartment of Commerce, Barclays, Amazon

Avi Bryant

• “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” -Alan Kay
• alias :smalltalk :ruby
• “All the best stuff is made in Japan.” -Marty McFly, in Back to the Future

Claim: Ruby’s features make it inherently slow.
Status: false

“the Java VM is one of the great tragedies of technology.”

what if your ruby object space were

• transactional and persisten
• transparently distributed
• terabyte-scale
• with no restrictions

gem stone

• up to a couple of thousand distributed smalltalk VMs sharing hundreds of gigs of persisten object memory with billions of indexed and queryable objects
• free as in beer up to 4GB

The key is to spend more time using objects rather than creating and saving them.

Ze Frank

“How do you have a talk at 8:30 at night. It’s like they adjusted the conference to programmer’s hours.”

“You have nothing to fear but fear itself. It’s called recursion. That’s like infinite fear.”

“…the chicken is not alive having recently been electrocuted.”

Do the work yourself or have your audience do it for you and take the credit. Some people call it web 2.0.

They are learning a new language (ours) and they want to have a media conversation.

What do you do with all the content consumers?

• ignore them
• control them
• shut them down
  • “…then you have myspace, which is this odd flavor of ugly”
  • “…in myspace there is no page that says, ‘make my page ugly’, you have to search around and find out how to make your page ugly. you have some user pasting css into their about page which is conflicting with other css on the page.”
  • how do we cultivate this energy?
• letting conversation emerge

Technology is a facilitator.

The Core Values

• Conversation
• Community
• Belonging