Speakers - Euruko 2011

• 

  Yukihiro Matsumoto

  Keynote

   

• 

  Paul Campbell

  Keynote

  Paul is a web guy from Dublin, Ireland. He is co-curator of funconf and a maker of fine web apps at HyperTiny.

• 

  Pat Allan

  Tales of the Big White Cloud

  Pat Allan is a freelancing web developer usually located in Melbourne, Australia. When not caught up in code, he can be found helping organise Rails Camps and Trampolines. His thoughts are blogged semi-regularly at freelancing-gods.com, and he’s been known to make a mean pancake.

  The cloud may look all light and fluffy, but should you go flying through the depths of the internet, you will find challenges and pitfalls aplenty. Gather round as Pat puts on his storytelling hat and regales you with tales of the trials and tribulations, the technology and automation, the lessons and rewards that are part of building a service in the cloud.

• 

  Ben Klang / Ben Langfeld

  Getting Hands On with Adhearsion

  A recovering Physics graduate, Ben now spends approximately 25 hours per day slinging Ruby and is enjoying it a lot more than quantum field theory. Writing voice applications is a perfect fit for him, not least as a result of his addiction to talking. That this can be directed towards a robot can only make the world a better place. Ben has a passion for integrating multiple technologies and has some interesting examples to share to demonstrate the power of Ruby in the field of communications.

  Adhearsion is the first open source framework to enable the creation of telephony applications. Watch as they demonstrate how to integrate with an existing Asterisk install or develop something fresh and interactive in the cloud. Use your phone to send instant messages or collect data. Plenty of code examples will be shared as they show you how to teach Ruby new telephony tricks.

• 

  Nick Sutterer

  Be Restful. Be web 2.0. But don't mix it

  Nick Sutterer appreciates the beauty of elegant code, and the value of open source software. Through his tireless development and advocacy of the Cells and Apotomo gems, he has brought the concepts of component-oriented UI development to the world of Rails, proving that there should be no such thing as a double-render error, and that one need not be slave to the great monolithic view mentality. Also, he would like to have beer with you.

  While you were hacking on your frontend, frantically trying to make that form do a PUT, just to be “RESTful”, did you ever consider just separating things? What if your GUI simply is a GUI, talking to REST backends behind the scenes? What if your backend is not a monolithic beast but multiple applications that are exposed as REST services? It is a common misapprehension that GUI and REST backend have to be one single, highly coupled system. Taking the best out of each framework, let's explore what other ways are possible!

• 

  Bodo Tasche

  Endless fun with Arduino and Eventmachine

  After seven years of working as a java developer, Bodo fall in love with ruby and moved to cologne to work as a full time ruby developer. He started tinkering with hardware as a teenager with his C-64, his dad created the robots and he wrote the software that made them move. Besides coding Bodo loves diving, traveling and biking.

  In his talk he will show how to connect an arduino with ruby using eventmachine. He will also show potential use cases and projects that can be created using this technique. Most of the projects can be finished on one weekend.

• 

  Lourens Naudé

  In the Loop

  Lourens is an independent Consultant originally from South Africa but currently based in sunny Madeira Island. He specializes in backend, platform, domain solutions and is well versed full stack and is known for his offbeat Ruby patches and extensions. He spends weekdays in the Platform team at wildfireapp.com and pushes Open Source contributions to github.com/methodmissing.

  The recent boom in Event Driven components and tools such as node.js, EventMachine, 0MQ and Redis resulted in product dependencies often misunderstood by development teams. All these components address the need for efficiently shifting and processing data between network, disk, memory and CPU - they fill a very specific niche for high performance data services. In practice however they often make their way into complex, coarse grained services. In his talk Lourens will address several gotchas through low level instrumentation and other visual cues, context switching (pun intended) between EventMachine and Redis specific examples.

• 

  Federico Brubacher

  The Expression Problem in Ruby: A focus on Traits.

  After changing careers thrice, Federico found his true love in being a language lover and a Ruby fan. Part of it being the awesome expressiveness of the Ruby language and part its amazing community. You can think about Federico as your next-door abstraction junkie. He is a fan of all the languages and all kind of weird abstractions for example bananas (aka folds), monads, arrows, etc. He then applies this knowledge in his everyday coding in Ruby.

  In his mind blowing talk Federico will explain what is know as the Expression Problem, which you might already have suffered but you didn't know it. Federico will continue then to give solutions in Ruby and explain why traits, a Ruby 2.0 feature, will be perfect for nullifying the Expression Problem.

• 

  Thorben Schröder

  Bridging the gap - Using JavaScript in Rails to write DRY rich client applications

  Thorben has a crush on Rails since he first got his hands wet in late 2006 and he never looked back. He graduated from University with a bachelor thesis on how to scale large Rails applications. Together with Jan Steinmetz he started kopfmaschine, a Rails shop located in Bremen, Germany, where their goal is to create the living room for local hackers. Bringing good people together, build great stuff, that's what kopfmaschine is all about.

  Beside normal web apps "kopfmaschine" is looking to bring their knowledge to customers who would not normally look for a web solution. Therefore they have built HTML5 apps that are used as "native" apps on Windows or mobile clients like the iPad. This was the starting point for his efforts to bridge the gap between Rails and JavaScript and that is what his talk is all about.

• 

  Karel Minařík

  Your Data, Your Search

  Karel Minařík is as a web development mercenary doing consulting work in Ruby/Rails and evangelizing about CouchDB, Git, NoSQL and distributed architectures. You can find more about him at karmi.cz.

  His talk will touch search in general and focus on ElasticSearch, a promising search engine and database, which fully embraces HTTP, understands JSON and comes with advanced distributed features. It's “elastic” both in the sense of working with data, as well as horizontal scaling, and its purpose is to make advanced search features, such as geo search and complex faceted navigation/aggregation widely available.

• 

  Kornelius Kalnbach

  Scanning Strings at Supersonic Speed

  Kornelius Kalnbach (a.k.a. murphy) is a Ruby programmer born in Berlin. He is in love with Ruby-chan since 2002. He also loves regular expressions and syntax highlighting. Thus he is tinkering with the CodeRay library. He works as a Rails developer since 2007, currently for sofatutor.com.
  His other interests include user interfaces, design, philosophy, Shadowrun, and he believes there's a ghost in the shell.

  In his talk Kornelius will explain how CodeRay manages to outperform other syntax highlighting libraries with pure Ruby code. After comparing performance on different Ruby platforms, he will show the key concepts of fast scanning. Visualizing some advanced ideas for further speedups, and will explain how syntax highlighting can take advantage of multi-core processors.

• 

  David Calavera

  JRuby Hacking Guide

  David had a great idea for a pet project once. The same day he started to work on it he had to send a patch to the JRuby project. A hundred of bugs fixed later he became a member of the JRuby Core Team.

  In his talk we’ll learn how to deal with the JRuby internal code from a more rubist and friendly point of view. Guided by tests we’ll discover what’s hidden underneath and we’ll learn how we can also start to contribute easily.

• 

  Elise Huard

  Actors on Stage

  After her studies in metallurgy, Elise realized a job in that area was not her cup of tea, so she looked for jobs in an earlier interest, software. 10 years in software have helped her get a firm understanding on what works and what will make you cry blood and tears on nights before deadlines. She’s a jack of all trades, loves reading, tinkering, food, travel, learning, and people out of the ordinary.

  In her talk she will explore several ways to implement the actor model in Ruby. The talk will also allude to the fact that threads in Ruby should ideally have separate state, so that all programs using threads could also use the actor model (or other similar concurrency models).

• 

  Paolo Perrotta

  The Revenge of method_missing()

  Paolo "Nusco" Perrotta worked for a dozen years as a developer and writer, in domains ranging from embedded to enterprise software, computer games, and web applications. By day, he earns his food as a trainer, mentor and agile coach for large corporations. At night, he likes to get his hands dirty with code.

  Nusco wrote the Metaprogramming Ruby book for the Pragmatic Programmers. After establishing himself as a premier expert on the subject, he was dissed by other rubyists for being a method_missing() fanboy.

  Convinced that nobody can bully method_missing() and get away with it, Nusco resolved to present a talk about it. When is method_missing() appropriate, and when should you pick an alternative metaprogramming magic spell instead? Is method_missing() really dangerous? What are the common method_missing() pitfalls, and how can you avoid them?

• 

  José Valim

  Writing your own programming language to understand Ruby better

  José Valim (@josevalim) is a Rails Core member and author of Crafting Rails Applications. Also, he is the lead-developer of Plataforma Tec, a Ruby on Rails consultancy firm based in Brazil. He started working with Ruby in late 2006 and since then he's been working on several open source projects.

  In this talk, José Valim will share what he has learned about Ruby while writing a small programming language. He will discuss the basic structure of a programming language, suggest improvements and debate about the Ruby's parser, Object Model, methods, iterators and blocks.

• 

  Julik Tarkhanov

  Ruby helps to make movies

  Julik has been smoking the Ruby pipe since 2004, when he has first seen a presentation about Rails. After graduating as a motion designer and starting his dream career in visual effects at HecticElectric, he still finds himself reaching for Ruby whenever a solution for problem needs to be found quickly (or even when he just feels like it!). Also he is the only person in VFX who officially uses IRB as his calculator.

  In his talk he would like to tell how he created Guerilla-DI, a niche opensource project in Ruby that quite a few people in the field are using, even though Ruby is not really known or used in the post-production community. He will explain what kind of problems Ruby can help with in post and VFX, and how to create a downloadable Ruby application. He will also explore the constraints that you might want to observe when deploying a ruby application to end users.

• 

  Jesper Richter-Reichhelm

  Games for the Masses: Scaling Rails to the Extreme

  Jesper Richter-Reichhelm has two big passions: developing software and games. For the last 10 years he had fun by developing software for large scale web sites. After he joined wooga as Head of Engineering he could do both as wooga is developing games for Facebook. Currently Jesper is happy and busy using Ruby and NoSQL databases to build social games that have more than 1,000,000 users every day at Europe's largest developer of social games.

  In his talk Jasper will explain and compare the work of two engineering teams that build Facebook game backends: Cloud vs. dedicated servers, SQL vs. NoSQL, specialized servers in a n-tier architecture vs. a swarm architecture where all servers can assume any role. He will highlight their respective advantages and disadvantages and discuss some common patterns both teams came up with to solve their problems.

• 

  Mateusz Drożdżyński

  Sentiment analysis of Twitter messages

  Mateusz Drożdżyński is the founder and CEO of Object Reload, a small software development house with offices in Cambridge (UK) and Gliwice (Poland). He is a Computer Science undergraduate at the University of Cambridge and has worked with multiple startup. He is an avid rower, chronic self-experimenter and a huge fan of quantifying and measuring all things meaningful.

  His talk will briefly cover the topic of sentiment classification, why is it difficult and why it matters in the first place. He then will go on to outline different classification methods and how to apply them in Ruby. He will also elaborate on how this approach holds up for multilingual messages.