I spent last week at the Mountain West Ruby Conference which is by far the best conference I’ve ever attended due to the brilliant minds that gather from all over the country. This year Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), the creator of ruby came from Japan to provide his aura to to adoring minions. I had the fortune to go to dinner and hang out with him a bit which was not an insignificant opportunity. I have to admire someone who is passionate about a programming language for the sake of the language. His brainchild powers many of the latest startups and provides jobs for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people. I asked what he thought about the significance of his contributions to the world. He said “ya, I guess it’s pretty cool”. For a guy that has every right to be impressed with himself he’s really nice and humble. I think the ruby community not only owes thanks for a great tool, but also for a personality that helped breed a friendly, helpful bunch of people. His example even has a name ‘MINSWAN’ (Matz is nice, so we are nice).
One of my favorite parts of the conference is the Engineyard hackfest. I had a chance to ask Yehuda Katz questions about Rails 3 and how to get my gems ready for the upcoming release. He’s brilliant, insightful and very helpful. The hour he spent helping me was worth weeks of surfing the net for tips, tricks and changes to the Rails framework.
Of course the wifi sucked. That kept me off twitter and delayed my blog post until today. That’s not a terrible thing as it kept my focus on some really great talks. I imagine they’ll be up on confreaks soon so if you missed the conference head over there.
Thanks to Mike Moore for once again putting on a great conference!