RuPy 2009 - Ruby/Python conference in Poznan Poland sum up
The RuPy conference 2009 was really a great event. I was totally excited how a polish technology conference will look like and I was impressed how the organiziers cared about everything. Among others Jakub P. Nowak, Katarzyna Bylec and Adam Parchimowicz helped with any open questions. They organized a hotel room as well as the transportation from and to the airport. That’s really a great thing for a non-commercial conf!
The conference itself was a hell lot of fun with very good speakers and valuable talks.
I enjoyed hanging around with Charles Nutter aka headius. I am totally impressed by his work for JRuby and his very smart and analytic way of thinking. His talk about JRuby without any slides was very motivating and helped me to find my enthusiasm for live coding sessions.
Another talk that souldn’t be missing on a good conference is Paolo Negri presenting RabbitMQ. I heard his talks before at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas and Rails Underground 2009 in London. They are never the same and always worth listening to them. Even multiple times.
Michael Dirolf’s talk An Introduction to MongoDB was very interesting. I really like MongoDB because it’s a document based DB with a query language that is very easy to understand for people with RDBMS experience. So have a look at it.
And of course don’t miss Eleanor McHugh. Her talk The Ruby Plumber’s Guide to *nix was very contrasting to other talks. She adviced people to remind that web applications are not aliens landed on a unix box but that they are still living in a symbiotic way with it. I think if you have a question about system programming - ask her! Don’t excpect a single sentence answer but be sure you will get a very profound one.
Serge Smetana presented Advanced Performance Optimization of Rails Applications. Badly I was unable to listen to his talk but everybody said it was very, very good. We talked a lot so I am totally sure that he really knows about optimization very well.
I have received a lot positive feedback for my own talk about Ruby and Python Enterprise Hosting as well. Thanks to everybody for that. I still think that people can save a lot of time, nerves and money if they really gather their requirements before diving into the hosting topic. I tried to sum up the most important factors when building a high availability hosting platform. So if you have any questions about this - just let me know.
View more presentations from Julian Fischer.
Beside the conference content there were a lot of great off topic conversations with many people. I totally liked hanging around with Chares, Michael, Serge, Elenor, Paolo and all the others. Hope to see these friends again, soon. Maybe on the next conf, maybe on the next RuPy?
P.S.: I heard about wedding crashers before. This time I saw my first conference crasher. There was this guy who found (or stolen) a conference batch. He used it to get free food and attended to a number of talks. Instead of beeing calm he talked to nearly every speaker. It turned out that he doesn’t have a clue what Ruby or Python is. At the end of the conf he told one of the organizers that he is actually not a legitimate attende. The orga team told him they will call the police. I saw the ANGST in his eyes :-) Mabe that’s what he needed after behaving very very odd and unpolite in many situations. However he was another fun factory for the conf!
So we’ll see next year at the RuPy?