GoRuCo – the party never stops!

It’s not often that you get a chance to attend a conference that has your name on it — well almost 😉 Gotham Ruby Conference (GoRuCo) in New York city was one such conference that I attended last weekend on 23rd June. It was very well organized and the organizers definitely get a thumbs-up for this their planning and efficiency – the conference had everything that was promised and much much more!

The pre-conference party was at Pivotal Labs and it was a blast – nice music, lots of Rubyists and met quite a few interesting people there. I was impressed to see so many entrepreneurs at the pre-conference bash.

The conference boasted of a great speaker line-up and it indeed lived up to the expectations. I like a conference where there is only one track and you don’t have to pick and choose talks.  GoRuCo also had a different format to accommodate more speakers – there were talks and micro-talks (10 minute talks).

The day started off with Dr. Nic giving a talk on production deployment – a seemingly simple topic but after the talk I realized there’s a lot than meets the eye – should your deployments be app-centric or node-centric or system-centric – very interesting indeed. Matt then took the stage by storm and spoke about data domain modeling and how and why we should have separate data from control flows by passing around messages. A much cleaner, modular and scalable architecture. It was interesting and had a hint of controversy and got a lot of questions from the audience.

After a quick break, Francis spoke on thick and thin client architecture – the pros and cons. He spoke about Backbone and Ember lightly and when and how they should be used. I did like this discourse (and should say digression) on how to choose technology as a company and as a programmer to get more recognition in the Ruby world.

After lunch – it was time for the first round on micro talks. Luke spoke about the rake asset pipeline and deploying Javascript frameworks – a very entertaining and interesting talk.  Haris was up next with a cool (open-sourced now) application on face recognition. Though too much light got in his eye – his talk got a lot of applause. He described how easy it was to get started with Apple APIs and Ruby applications.  Matt from Yammer (congrats on the acquisition) was up next and described how they cache data that accounted for almost 98% hits. Pat then took stage and spoke about Hashes – a seemingly simple topic but very deeply rooted on performance of Ruby. I would definitely recommend reading his book on ruby internals – Ruby Under a Microscope

Justin then took stage and explained about sensible testing and CUPID testing. Consistent distance, Unstubbed, Pyramidal, Idempotent and  Distinct. It was very cool talk with loads of questions. David got on stage after this and explained all the predicaments and mis-interpretations of the DRY principle in Ruby. He got delayed due to some fire accident but it was great that he made it for the conference after that – not that it affected him during his talk – theatrics of running across stage was awesome! 🙂

After yet another quick break, Justin spoke about the Hungry Academy and its graduates. Kudos to LivingSocial and JumpStartLab for sponsoring this – it is surely going to change the lives of these 24 graduates and inspire a lot more – quite a few of them do not even have a computer science degree or have never programmed before!!

I missed the next talk by Grape API by Delmont (do comment on this post about it) but was present for Sebastian talk on using Map APIs. That was some serious stuff – how and when to use Google Map APIs and when not to use them and do your own thing. Very nice talk.

The final talk was by Jim about Power Rake and it was awesome – may I add ‘as usual’. Jim took the audience very smoothly through all the facets of rake using a very nice scenario of image management. It was interesting to know about Rules and tasks.

And just like that – we were all set for the Yatch party with an open bar. It was spectacular because there were fireworks next to the Statue of Liberty and we were all in the right place at the right time. The party went on into the night and I met quite a few entrepreneurs who are indeed in the right place at the right time.

spinlister.com – Recently launched by Jeff Noh and his friends. Impressed because they are in their early twenties and budding entrepreneurs already!

homeswap.com – Started by Gabriel Yarra and it seems a very promising idea!

houdiniapi.com – Started by Chris Conley and takes Mechanical Turk to a new level – on steriods!

qriousapp.com– Started by Kliment and its an awesome app for finding people with similar interests at a conference. Very innovative indeed.

yapp.us – started by Luke Melia (one of the speakers) is a very well designed website for making your own app.

There were quite a lot of other people whom I did meet but the whisky was really too good to remember everyone 🙂 Forgive me and feel free to send me updates for this post.

I will surely make it to GoRuCo next year – hopefully as a speaker.