Presentations this and next week

Wow. JRuby 1.1 is out! Go get! (And incidentally, wouldn't JRuby be the perfect way for Google to support Ruby in Google Apps Engine?)

I'll be doing a talk tonight at .NETAkademien about Ruby and Rails. It's mostly an introduction.
You can find more info here.

On Thursday I'll speak about JRuby at Developer Summit in Stockholm. I'll be in the Dynamic Languages track and you can read the abstract and more information here.

And finally, next Monday I'll talk about JRuby at the Stockholm Ruby User Group. You can find out more information about that event here.

Overall, it feels like the conference season is starting up again. I'll be presenting at JavaOne in a month too.

I've been extremely quiet here lately. It's been a bit slow in JRuby land, actually, and my focus has been elsewhere. Hopefully I'll be able to start posting some really cool stuff soon - I have something up my sleeve that should be possible to talk about soon.

My presentation from JavaBin

If someone is interested in the presentation I did at javaBin in Bergen and Oslo, it can be found here.

JRuby presentation in Bergen

Next Wednesday (the 15th) I will present about JRuby in Bergen. I mentioned this in an earlier post. More information can be found here: http://www4.java.no/web/show.do?page=42;7&appmode=/showReply&articleid=5493.

JRuby at FOSCON 2007

So, I will attend and present at FOSCON 2007, which is arranged by the Portland Ruby Brigade (PDX.rb), and the theme is Really Radical Ruby. It's on Tuesday, more information here. It seems to be an interesting event, so please show up!

I have not yet decided what I'm going to talk about. JRuby will be involved in some way of course. Anyone have any request about what I should talk about?

Burning cycles: the next month

Getting back from RailsConf meant getting thrown into loads and loads of preparation work for London. Oh my. Since I'm moving in 8 days, and almost all packing needs to be done during the weekend (and I haven't begun yet), I don't think I'll be able to be that communicative. Further, I will have no access to a computer or cell phone from Wednesday to Monday, so if I don't answer email, don't get upset. =) That incidentally means I won't blog either.

June 4th will be my first day at ThoughtWorks and I'm incredibly excited by it. Hopefully I'll be able to blog some about my experiences, but I guess the first few days will be focused on getting setup and finding an apartment (If you know any nice place close to Camden Town that's available by the beginning of June, please do tell), and doing all manner of things.

If I'm unlucky I'll need to go to DC the week after that, but we'll see. Hopefully I can wrangle out of it, since Stella (my girlfriend) will arrive in London that weekend.

After that week I'll have a week of quiet and solitude, and then it's time for TheServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona. I will in fact be involved in no less than three events during this conference. First, a technical session on JRuby, secondly a BoF about deploying JRuby on Rails applications, and third a panel discussion called "2020: A Developer's Odyssey Panel", which is bound to be interesting. I have no idea whatsoever about what I'll say yet, but Martin Fowler will be one of the panelists which makes it a certainty of fun. I'm looking forward to TSSJS for a few more reasons; seeing Barcelona, since that is said to be a lovely city, getting to say hi to Dr. Heinz Kabutz, meet up with Jonas Bonér from Terracotta and continue discussing how to utilize Terracotta and JRuby together. I'm looking very much forward to the whole event, in fact. If you are there, don't hesitate to say hi!

JRuby at TheServerSide Java Symposium - Europe

Not sure if I've mentioned this, but I will represent JRuby at TheServerSide Java Symposium - Europe, in Barcelona, June 27-29. I will give one technical session on JRuby, and one BOF on how to deploy JRuby on Rails applications, both which should be quite exciting.

There are also a number of other nice presentations, so try to get to Barcelona!

Me presenting JRuby

I totally forgot about this; 4-6 weeks ago, I did a presentation for the local Railsgroup here in Stockholm; since Dr Nic was there, I decided to improve it in English. And Dr Nic did us the service of taping the whole presentation; I was sick at the time, it's a short presentation about what's new in JRuby, but it could still be potentially interesting for some of you.

It's available at Google Video, here.

Post Rails meetup

Last evening was very nice. We usually have a good time at the Rails meetups, hosted by Valtech. Yesterday it started out with Dr Nic William, who spoke about some metaprogramming techniques. Very neat, and the best part was his Magic Wiggly Lines. I'm not sure if it's genius or mental. But it's cool, at least; it's basically a const_missing hook, which makes it possible to use class names even if you spell them wrong. Hehe.

After that I spoke about new JRuby thing. I have a cold, so I took it pretty easy, and it was very free form with questions. There was many interesting questions, actually, and I think Nic taped it all...

After that, we drank beer and talked technology, which is always fun!

Rails meet in Stockholm

And it's time again for a Rails meetup in Stockholm, at Valtech. This Tuesday (20th) 6pm at Valtechs offices. It is usually very interesting and neat to meet other people involved in Rails and Ruby here in Stockholm, and it's usually very nice, all around.

I will have a short presentation on the new features in JRuby 0.9.8. I will provide a fast intro to JRuby, but this is not the introductionary presentation; I will also try a somewhat different presentation technique, so it is sure to be interesting. At least for me... =)

Show up! It's worth it. You need to reserve a place, though, which can be done at http://www.rails.se/rails/show/Railstr%C3%A4ff+20+Mars+2007

Two more days in Kraków

I was very lazy on Saturday. Took it very easy, then went to a dinner with some of the presenters and organizers for SFI. And after that I gave my presentation, which I personally felt went very well. I had to adapt the technical level some, because it seemed most of the audience didn't know much about compilers. After that, Lukas held his presentation about Seaside, which also went well.

Then we celebrated. Then there was headache. And a look at the Cathedral. And a taxi driver who didn't understand one word of English. And he took me to the wrong terminal at the airport. But I finally got on the right flight and got home.

Two days in Kraków

So, I've been in Kraków for two days now. I will fly back on Sunday. It's a very interesting town. On one part, it's lovely. The buildings are absolutely amazing, and very beautiful. On the other hand, many of them are very run down, and the wear and tear is obvious all around. To me, the whole town seems sort of depressing, but on the other hand the people here are very up beat, and from some of the presentations I've seen, the technological future for Kraków looks very bright indeed.

I haven't really been able to see most of the presentations. Almost all have been in Polish, sadly enough. I did see two interesting ones yesterday. The first was Michael Foords talk about IronPython. This was very neat and I've talked some with him after that too. I'll get back to that. The other talk was about Google Ads, by Greg Badros. As always, hearing about how Google does things internally is always amazingly interesting. I would have enjoyed hearing more about the machine learning and NLP stuff they're doing, but obviously they can't discuss that too much.

Today I haven't been able to see any presentation, due to Polish. On the other hand me, Michael and Lukas Renggli have had some very interesting discussions both yesterday and today. Now, the company Michael's part of has the largest IronPython code base in the world, as far as I understand it. It's basically 90 000 LOC, where 20 000 is production code and 70 000 are testing code. That sounds about right... =)

Lukas Renggli is one of the core developers of Seaside, a framework which I'm quite fond of. What we three have in common is our interest in dynamic languages, so we had some very common ground to talk about. What's nice is that many of the things Michael talked about in his presentation is stuff we in JRuby also speak much about. In the same manner, it seems the IronPython guys have had basically the same problems we in JRuby has had. It seems there is some common ground to be found here, and possibly also a basis for conversations. I for one would find that very interesting, since I enjoy hearing about dynamic languages getting foot holds on statically typed virtual machines; that is just such a sweet spot.

Tomorrow evening is my talk. I'm going to be at an official dinner in the middle of the day, and then get over to the conference and give my presentation at 17:00. I think it's going to be interesting, and it will be an obvious counterpart to Michael's talk, since the reason for existing is so similar for IronPython and JRuby. It will be interesting to see how the audience react.

After that, I'll see Lukas talk about Seaside, and after that people are talking about having a party, so tomorrow will be quite intense. And finally, on Sunday I'm going back to Sweden. As far as I know now, I won't travel that much for at least a month now, which feels sort of nice. This week has been far to intense, and also have had some really great - but tiring - moments.

Tomorrow is today - or from London to Stockholm to Krakow

Part I: London

I got up at 5am, got dressed and packed and headed of to the airport. Finally got on the plane to London (thank god for online check-in) and tried to get some work done. That didn't go very well, but I got to read some instead. I'm rereading Ubik. Classic. Landed at Heathrow about 10 minutes behind schedule. Ran to the Piccadilly line, tried to talk with people in Sweden, but the connection was kinda bad. Arrived at Covent Garden, walked in brisk pace to the place of my meeting. Finally arrived, 5 minutes late, to find out there was no hurry. Sat down and had a pleasant chat with Dan North and Simon Stewart. Very nice. (Hey Dan, if you read this, get in touch when you're in Stockholm for ExpertZone. I know places with good beer.).

Then, Lunch. Haha. What a joke. I found a place that seemed to offer great vegetarian burgers, so I settled down for a quorn burger and some British chips. After 15 minutes waiting I got told the grill wouldn't light up. Lucky me. Instead, I had to make do with a Pret sandwich and a spicy vegetable Cornish pasty (someone told me it was the day of the Cornish patron saint yesterday, so I guess that fits). A few minutes walk on Oxford street was nice. I got photographed by some guys from an Austrian fashion magazine. Then back for the real meeting.

Cyndi Mitchell is a very formidable person. I was impressed. We had a 2 hour talk; very interesting. I will tell you all about it as soon as I can. But suffice to say, I was very happy when I left. Until I realized that I had exactly 2 hours until my flight taxed out from Heathrow. So, back to Covent Garden. Back on the underground. Which through some bad communication on the drivers part, almost ended badly when the train reached the end stop before Heathrow. Thanks to the people who told me to get of the train and switch to the other side. =) I finally got to Terminal 3, realized I already had a boarding card, found my way to the security check, got my boots scanned two times, and found the gate about 20 times before takeoff. Of course, as soon as the aircraft had taxed out, the flight management decided that we should stay 30 minutes on ground before finally taking off towards Copenhagen. It's a wonder I actually got there in time. So, in Copenhagen I walked 2 klicks to the transfer center, got a new boarding card and walked back to almost the exact place I started from, got on my flight to Stockholm and finally landed. Wow.

Airport coach to Stockholm city, and night bus home to my dear old mental hospital. When I finally got to bed I ached all over, and had been awake and active for 22 hours solid. Sleep was nice at that point. Especially since the day had been a success on all accounts.

Part II: Stockholm

I finally woke up, took care of mail and told everyone about London. Thought I'd take it easy, maybe practice on my presentation for Saturday, possibly start writing on the presentations for the CS course I'm going to speak for this April. But alas, after some mailing with Poland, I realized I've made a big mistake. I thought I was going to Kraków this Friday, and staying until Sunday. That's not entirely right. I'm actually going tomorrow. Surprise!

So.

Part III: Kraków

As mentioned above, I'll land in Kraków tomorrow (Wednesday) evening. This is good in several ways. I will have a chance to see the city, and I will have the opportunity to see some more presentations at the conference I'm at. There are many interesting things to be had; I'm sad half of them are in Polish. I guess I can look at the slides and have some fun trying the guess the meaning. I am going to see the talks about IronPython, Google Ads and Seaside. And, of course, if anyone is nearby and would like to take a beer and talk computers, programming languages, AI, or whatnot, please hit me a mail, or a comment on this post. My evenings will be mostly free it seems.

That is, unless someone knows any good clubs with nice music; especially electronic stuff and/or postpunk, new wave, darkwave or gothy things.

Anyway. Time to sleep.

The world is spinning

If you didn't know that, the title tells it all. Of course, that's old news.

I haven't really been able to blog as much as I wish I could have, lately. There are reasons for this, of course. Two very exciting reasons, in fact. If everything pans out, I will be able to write about it in 2 to 3 weeks time.

In other news, we are gearing up for another JRuby release. This one will be a biggie. Many nice things will be in place, and it will set the record for both new features and bug fixes. I think no one will be disappointed by it, actually.

I have a few presentations lined up too. The closest to now will be in exactly two weeks. I will speak at the Academic Computer Science Festival in Craków, Poland. If you're somewhere close, by all means offer to show me the city. =) I will land March 9:th and fly out again March 11:th. My presentation will be at 17:00 March 10:th, CET. If you would like more information, it can be found at the festivals homepage, here. The presentation will be in English (since I don't speak Polish, obviously), and it will be slightly more technical than the usual JRuby presentations. There will probably be some detail about our runtime, interpreter, parser and lexer, and hopefully I'll get some info in about our YARV and Java bytecode compiler efforts. This will be very exciting to talk about, I'm kinda salivating just thinking about it. =)

Another, more long term presentation, has just been decided. I will attend TheServerSide Java Symposium Europe, in Barcelona, from June 27:th to June 29:th, and talk about JRuby from the perspective of a Java developer, and what it can do for you. Hopefully I will have time to see the city too.

I will update with more information when possible.

JavaForum: last night

And now it's over. Last night was the last presentation for me in a while. Over 200 people where there and the place was packed. I must say I'm very pleased with how my part went. I felt really good, much flow and the demonstrations went perfect.

Rob Harrop and Adryan Colyer talked about Spring 2.0 and AOP. It was fairly interesting, but since I've done some work with AOP before I felt that the level was a bit to introductory. No real meat.

JavaForum announced a day focused on Java in January, with four tracks and some great speakers. Looks very nice.

JRuby in Stockholm, JavaForum on Tuesday

On Tuesday it's time for the big JavaForum in Stockholm. I'm looking very much forward to it and have spent some hours today sharpening the presentation. Of course it will be very interesting to see Rob Harrop too.

In other news, something quite exciting is probably just around the corner...

JRuby presence at JavaOne 2007

The call for papers went out two days ago, and we already have several good proposals in line that will be submitted to JavaOne. Hopefully we will get many interesting talks this year. As far as I know, there are at least 5 JRuby-specific proposals submitted, and there will hopefully be more.

I am sending in two different proposals this year, one about JRubyEE (it's called "Agile Enterprise Development with JRuby"). That will be interesting to do and I really believe there is much for Java enterprise development to use in JRuby.

The second proposal is for a BOF about several JVM languages called "Lambda on the JVM: JRuby, Jython and Lisp". I'll talk about how to utilize different JVM alternative languages to do interesting and useful things. Since this is my venue, I will specialize on languages that are derived from Lisp (implicitly or explicitly). (I include both Ruby and Python in this category).

Hopefully at least one of the proposals will get through.

Some notes from the Stockholm Rails meet

Last night (Wednesday) about 35 developers with an unhealthy interest in Rails met up in Stockholm, at Valtech's offices, to share some experiences and talk shop.

It was very interesting and fun to meet people I can relate to. We ended up talking programming languages for a few hours after the main event ended.

Peter Marklund did a presentation on a CRM system in Rails, and Christian and Albert from Adocca talked about caching, and handling a Rails application that needs to scale into the millions. Nice stuff.

Last, I did an improvised presentation on LPW, a small Rails application that is fed its main data through Web Services instead of ActiveRecord. I believe it went fairly well, even though I had no slides and almost no preparation... =)

Speakings this and next week

Just a quick notice. I will be talking this wednesday at a Rails group in Stockholm. The subject will (for once) not be about JRuby, at least not primarily. Instead I will talk about an application called LPW, which is interesting since it doesn't use a database as the main data feed, but a bunch of Web Services that are implemented by a third party and deployed with EJB's in Axis. I had all kinds of challenges, but in the end the result became very good. I will talk a little about what you can expect when trying to interface with Java in this way, and good tricks on how to handle an alternative to ActiveRecord as model.

I've written a bit about LPW sometime this summer, if anyone is interested.

Next week is the JavaForum meet up in Stockholm, and I will speak after Rob Harrop. The subject is JRuby and the day is Tuesday. As far as I know, the meet up is full.

The presentation will be pretty standard JRuby fare for Java developers.

Speaking engagements

This Monday (30:th October) I'll go to Malmö to present on JRuby at JavaForum, as I posted a few weeks ago. After everything is over I'll have an hour or two to spend before my train leaves, so if anyone is up for beer I'm game.

I will also present at JavaForum in Stockholm 21:th November. The presentation will be mostly the same, except for possible interesting developments during that time. At the same night Rob Harrop of Interface21 will present on Spring, AOP and ActiveJ. That promises to be very interesting, so I recommend everyone in the region to get there. =)

More information at http://javaforum.se.

JRuby presentation in Malmö

It is now final that I will be presenting JRuby at JavaForum in Malmö, the 30:th October. There is more information available at www.javaforum.se.