Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.
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http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/date/20090505 Tuesday May 05, 2009

Rails Conf 2009 Day 2 Trip Report

This is a follow up post from David's keynote.

Attended Women in Rails panel discussion. The panel, Sarah Mei, Lori Olson, and Desi McAdam (from L to R), had a very interesting discussion around the genuine problems and possible solutions of involving more women in Rails community.

Sarah is trying to involve more women in the San Francisco Ruby meetup. She plans to invite non-traditional audience like those who never programmed before, other language programmers, and similar. The details will be shared after performing the exercise for a year. Lori started Calgary Ruby Group. She do lot of self promotion so that younger women feel inspired. Desi is a co-founder of devChix with the purpose of "build a community of women developers". All the panelists were very vocal about being visible, having a blog and twitter presence is a good start.

Here are some random notes captured ...

Women drop out because of kids, try to get a job and then come back with a gap in the resume. It's difficult to get a new job at that time. Sarah is trying to reach out to that group who have that gap in their resume.

Visbility is important "She did that, I can do too!".

Data point: Women % in Rails community is much less than in other development community, e.g. Java or .NET world.
Another data point: % of women is more in larger companies, not in smaller companies. The reason is facilities like maternity leave, training (don't have evening hours to train themselves, can't sacrifice family time), etc.

Real stats from 2006: Women participation in open source community is 2-3%, 20-25% in "enterprise"

Appeal from the panelist "Guys, help us, tell .NET developer that Rails is not all guys, spread the word.".

Here are some Q&As captured:

Q. Should women be given free/discounted tickets to RailsConf ?
A. If women can't pay for it, then devChix can help them. RailsConf have helped before. It'll help if childcare is available.

Q. Why are we only looking at CS ? Why not other areas who have the development skills ?
A. Panel do reach out to multiple audience and seeks help from everybody in spreading the word. Women will be working on JavaScript and thinks she is designer. A guy will read 3 blog entries and thinks he is developer. There is a market salary differential between designer and developer. Women need to be more public about their programming status.

Q. Women won't present themselves as something they are not confident because they'll be called upon. How do you fix it ?
A. Everybody is learning. David's comment "I don't know everything in Rails" was commended. Girls need to know if it's important then they can figure it out. They are scared of messing the impression of their gender.

And of course there was a discussion on "Pr0ngate scandal":

Sarah: Matt is not a bad guy, he made a mistake that lot of people make in software development. If 1 out of 100 does not match the pattern of software developer, then that "1" may not be a software developer. The organizers of the conference did not do anything wrong. I voted for the talk and trust the judgement of the people. A negative feeling started developing but don't want to see that honestly. We learned something from it. As a relatively young community, this was bound to happen.

Lori: Not from the presentation itself but form the community reaction to this event. Blown out of proportion because of the same reasons when there is a conflict with developers in same company. You can't argue with somebody regarding how they feel. Can have a discussion, but argument is never going to be a win for anyone. That's where the community reaction devolved.

Desi: If Matt would've said "Oh Crap, I offended and wouldnt mean to offend you.", everything would've been fine. To David: "Next time, do us a favor and keep your mouth shut. It didn't help."

I was certainly expecting many more women to show up in the room but there were very few. Anyway, read Desi's blog entry about the panel. And I reached out to all three of them for helping in any manner :)

I presented on Develop with Pleasure, Deploy with Fun: GlassFish and NetBeans for a better Rails experience, slides here. The several concepts in the talk are explained in the following bullets:

The next talk of the day was JRuby: State of the Art

Why JRuby on VM ?
  • Best memory management
  • Dynamic optimizations
  • Reliable native threads: run threads across multiple cores
  • Vast number of libraries
  • Interop with Java, Scala, Rhino, Jython, ...
  • Ubiquitous
Performance
  • Fastest production-ready Ruby implementation
  • Definitely faster than 1.8.6
  • JRuby -> Bytecode -> Native code -> Optimizations
Future JVM Work
  • "invokedynamic": Build fast dynamic invocation in JVM, JRuby support by June, allow Hotspot to do all optimizations across Ruby calls
  • Multi-language VM "Da Vinci Machine", Optimized tail calls, continuations, fixnums, value types
Threading
  • Only production-ready impl with real threads
  • Ruby thread is a normal thread that can run on multiple cores
Simple Rails App
  • 1 Controller/Mode/View, send 1000 reqs
  • 80% less memory in 10 instance example, 96% for 20 instances
GlassFish
  • Gem, WAR-based
  • nginx, Apache: mod_proxy
Ruby 1.9 is 80-90% complete, IRB works, RubyGems works

FFI
  • Call C functions directly from Ruby
  • Portable unlike extensions
Who uses JRuby ?
  • Kenai
  • Gravitor
  • King Pong (JRuby wrapping MonkeyEngine)
  • Oslo's Gardermoen Airport to refuel planes
  • ThoughtWorks Mingle
    • No cross-platform SVN libraryfor Ruby
    • Bundling of installation
    • Security (ecnrypting source code)
    • Memory profile
    • Avoiding process proliferation
  • mix.oracle.com
    • 5 developers, 6 weeks for all development, 2887 LOC
  • Trisano: Open source infectious disease reporting system
    • Ease of deployment
    • Every enterprise on the planet run Java
    • Extensive project roadmap
Check out interactive Q & A from the session in the following video fragment:

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play


Later in the evening, Brian Helmkamp, Aman Gupta, Luis Navena, Pat Allan, Dan Kubb, and John Nunemaker were awarded Ruby Heroes Award!


And the keynote by Tim Ferris, lets not talk about it ;-) I edited pictures, authored my blog, caught up on email/RSS during the keynote. #railconf on IRC and twitter were way more fun! Check the live ratings.

"1" was the lowest rating that could be given anyway!

Watch the interview on why Sea Change Affinity picked JRuby/GlassFish.

Finally watch some of the snapshots captured today:

And then the evolving album:



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Sea Change Affinity - Why JRuby/GlassFish ?


At Rails Conf 2009, Jay McGaffigan from Sea Change talked about why they choose JRuby/GlassFish for their product Affinity. Here are some of the reasons he quoted:

  • Performance characterisitics (of GlassFish) have been excellent
  • Picked GlassFish based upon the recommendations from the people in industry
  • Dramatically more throughput on our GlassFish installation, 400 requests/sec instead of 100 requests/sec comapred to Tomcat
Watch the interview recorded earlier today:


Read other simiar stories at glassfish+rubyonrails+stories.

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Rails Conf 2009 Day 2 - DHH Keynote


Rails Conf Day 2 start with DHH's keynote. The room was packed (close to 1200 attendees) and SRO. It was interesting to know that 70% of the attendees are first timers and only a handful have attended for all 4 years in a row. This is my second in the US.

Here are the notes from DHH's keynotes:

  • Stop fretting about whether you are upto date with the latest in Rails. Don't need to re-write your application everytime something new comes up.
  • Gallery of "normal wounds"
    • Rails isn't enterprise ready, James McGovern "some consutant, architect, or bullshit title of a big company". Can't win the world with better arguments, some things take time.
    • Multiple frameworks like Grails, Sails, Biscuit, Monorail seem to give the impression Java is easier
    • Switch back to PHP after 2 years on Rails y Derik Severs (sp?)
    • The failed whale, "the twitter debacle" that Rails doesn't scale.
    • Merb - "the most credible alternative to Rails". Even though emotions can run high, the underlying principles are still the same.
  • Fundamental principle of Rails are still the same, it's better and faster
  • Philosophy of Rails3
    • Buck up all the unicorns - it's not going to be a rewrite f everything
    • No holy cows - "There is nothing secret in Rails, everything is up for public debate"
    • Have tasty burgers: it's all pre-assembled and use it the default way, otherwise pick/choose whatever you like. Allow people to make individual choices and still be together in one community.
  • Progress of Rails 3 - Ton of Rails 3 code in the repository, no alpha release
    • New Router: Faster route by subdomains, user agents, more Route to other Rack machinery. Mount multiple applications like Sinatra and Django using this router. Much simpler routing API. "Ruby is not about fewer lines of code, it's about expressive lines of code."
    • XSS protection: Flipping the convention such that all outputting views will be escaped, so "<%=raw" will not escape it and "<%" will escape it by default. HTML helpers "html_safe" may be used too.
    • JavaScript goes unobstrusive and agnostic: Will adopt HTML 5 custom attributes such as "data-remote" and "data-method" attribtues will simplify "link_to_remote", "remote_form", "link_to".
    • More agnosticism: Action ORM is a slim wrapper around other ORM tools, Generators (SoC project)
    • Great refactoring (bulk of the work): Abstract Controller + Action Dispatch, Active Relation (also GSoC project) underpins Active Record, Cherry picking from Active Support, Speedy callbacks
  • Real secret to high productivity
    • Most developers treat requirements as stone tablets, don't treat requirements as gospel, instead renegotiate requirements.
    • Use Twix instead of a fine Belgian chocolate, it doesn't really matter most of the time.
    • Programmers are like puppies who want to fetch the same ball again and again, bark back instead
    • Calling people programmer is like a blackbox, we are not those boxes. Instead we should be treated as partners, work with our stakeholders to get the job done.

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Rails Conf 2009, Las Vegas - Day 2 Run




Eight of us started at 6:15am this morning from the Hilton Lobby, looped around Las Vegas Country Club and another short loop in the neighborhood for a total of 5.2 miles in 43:18 mins.

Interested in running together while attending Rails Conf ? Follow @railsConfRunner and meet us at 6:15am in the Hilton lobby.

And don't forget your Tequilas - it's Cinco de Mayo!

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