RuPy 2009
Having caught back up on lost sleep, I'd say that RuPy is one of my favorite smaller conferences this year. It took place in Poznan, Poland on November 7-8th. As the name indicates, the first couple of incarnations of RuPy were focused on Ruby and Python. This year they expanded the field to dynamic languages in general. However, I was the ONLY non-Ruby/Python presenter there. I guess some folks got scared by the distance and or language. All sessions at RuPy were done in English. It did take a while to go to Poznan from California, but the warmth of the organizers made it worthwhile.
I presented Griffon: Swing just got fun again to a nearly full room and it went really well despite some hiccups in demos due to my having been sleep deprived. You see I had a dev event for work that I had attend so I flew from SFO on a British Airways red-eye to London at 7:50PM Thursday, then hopped on a LOT Polish Airlines flight to Warsaw and a prop plane to Poznan on Friday evening. I arrived in Poznan about 8 hrs before I was due to present.
During the Q&A portion of my preso, I had to address the *"Strachan incident"*. Sigh.
Charlie Nutter attended my session, we were in the same time slot at StrangeLoop, and was a good sport about the minor ribbing I gave him about Groovy's win at the ScriptBowl. His tweet about "implementing Griffon in 75 lines of code" caused a bit of a tempest in a teapot but it was a joke. So much for my saying that Groovy and JRuby's relationship has evolved and the two are comfortable with each other.
The organizers had to roll with the punches a little as some folks cancelled at the last minute, as in no-showed or got to Poznan but became incredibly ill. If you are ill or cancel with adequate notice, I understand, but we developers live and die by our word, integrity, and body of work. It doesn't matter that it is RuPy and not RubyConf. If you give your word, you should keep it. And we all should learn from Andy Azula that flying the morning of a speaking engagement is incredibly risky.
The Rubyists and Pythonistas(yes, they call themselves that) I met were really cool but I would have liked more Groovy people to have come out. There is a lot our communities can learn from each other and cooperate on.
Video of the session will available in about 3 weeks or so I've been told.