Volunteering at FutureRuby last weekend was a pretty sweet deal. Aside from a bit of lifting and fetching, my job was to stand at the back of the conference room during every talk, which is the only thing in the world I would have wanted to do anyway. Kudos to the organizers for thinking of that, and for generally being superhuman and making the whole thing come together.

FutureRuby, and its predecessor RubyFringe, distinguished themselves from other tech conferences with their ecclectic, off-beat talks and lavish parties. Here are some highlights:

Austin Che revealed why biotech has not been progressing as rapidly as silicon tech: lack of high-level abstractions for describing gene sequences. In other (dumber) words, biologists are still programming with punch cards but their programs are millions of lines long, so there's a lot of copy and paste going on. But they are building things, like clocks, cameras, and things that smell like bananas. DNA synthesis technology is now riding the Moore's Law curve, so you may soon have one of these in your kitchen. Austin was handing out modular genetic components on cards, complete with a dab of real, pure DNA.

After years of curiosity, I finally experienced a session of Terrible Noises for Beautiful People lead by its creator, local bohemian hero Misha Glouberman. Its purpose is to bring the experience of collaborative music making to mere mortals who don't play instruments. It clearly had an effect on everyone as we would frequently break into spontaneous renditions of "the vowel sound" throughout the rest of the conference.

Brian Merick dispelled some of my cynical notions about Agile development by explaining the context in which it was created: talented programmers working in oppressive corporate environments, with a primal need to be productive. Agile was their way of fighting back against dysfunctional processes and PHBs. Merick literally wrote the book on Agile, though he will modestly claim that his contribution was nothing more than adding the word "manifesto" to the title. He also knows a lot about the social organization of cows, an unexpectedly engaging topic.

Other presentations, which I don't have time to thoroughly cover, included a Ruby-controlled robotic blimp, confessions of a reformed malware author, a few inspiring soapbox meta-rants and many ooh-ahh tech demos.

All three days of the conference ended with opulent festivities. Saturday night's annexing of the Pravda Vodka Bar was especially unforgettable.



This was my very first tech conference experience and I'm afraid I've been spoiled.