Euruko 2009 Summary

May 11

Posted by Sandro Paganotti in Ruby on Rails - 1 comment

Euroko’s 2009 is over and in these few lines I’ll try to summarize two days full of sessions, laughs and Ruby. Everything started with Matz’s opening speech which focuses on ‘Things we got’ explaining why Ruby’s got all the features a good language need (starting from the name), what are the next steps in the core development and why we don’t need to rush in the future.

During the day I found two very interesting speeches: one from Javier Ramirez that told us about Gosu, an enjoyable and pretty powerful gaming framework suitable for Ruby which can also be combined with Chipmunk (a physics engine) in order to obtain awesome effects and collisions.

Then I stumbled upon Cory Forsyth and his talk about Image Manipulation with Ruby that focuses on how to obtain three kind of quite advanced effects: photo-mosaic, seam carving and face detection using Ruby, Rmagick and some other cool libraries. On Cory Forsyth github page is also possible to appreciate some very well made examples about these techniques.

The day ends up (at least for me ‘cause I know some guys went partying somewhere) with a very nice stand up dinner made with delicious catalan ‘Jamon y Queso’ .

Sunday comes with an exceptional list of talks that impressed me much, starting from Adhearsion: a framework crafted to help people deploy applications that need to interact with Asterisk servers. The presentation was really cool and comprised a live coding demo which showed us how to write simple voice-enabled applications (with menus and digit recognition). After a short coffee break we met Adam Blum and Rhodes, a framework that let you create mobile applications for almost any existing smartphone using Ruby as coding language and HTML for creating views.

Then it was the turn of Pablo Formoso Estrada; his talk focused on Archaeopteryx which make the whole conference dance and clap their hands at the rhythm of a Ruby-driven runtime midi generator at which Pablo made adjustment just like a dj does with disks. Aslak Hellesøy then performed a good presentation explaining us what is Cucumber (a tool that helps creating semantic and readable tests written in human language) and showing us its latest features.

The last cool speech of the day was helded by Tomasz Stachewicz and focused on RuDy , a tool that lets you create Ruby extensions in D. The whole presentation was made to look like Antonietti’s much discussed ‘Perfoming like a Pr0n star’ but with ‘rock’ instead of ‘porn’, the result was very hilarious and it’s definitively worth a look.

And.. that’s it! Hope you enjoyed this summary and… see you next year in Krakovia!

ps: pictures of the event can be found at Euruko 2009 flickr photostream

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