Announcement

LA Ruby Conference 2010

This is the second year for the LA Ruby Conference. Come and join us to learn about ruby and related technologies and software development practices that might change the way you do your job.

Registration for the conference is open. The conference on Saturday is $199.00. The training workshops on Friday are $60.00 each.

February 19-20, 2010
Holiday Inn
Burbank, CA

Speakers

Sarah Allen @ Blazing Cloud /

Sarah Allen is a serial innovator with a history of developing

leading-edge products, such as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video, and OpenLaszlo. She has a habit of recognizing great and timely ideas, finding talented teams, and creating compelling software. She has led small and large teams and confidently turns vision into reality.

She is CTO of Mightyverse, a mobile startup focused on helping people

communicate across languages and cultures. The technology is still being incubated, but parts of it are emerging at mightyverse.com. Currently, Mightyverse is primarily self-funded, so Sarah is paying the bills with independent consulting and training.

Sarah leads a small consulting group, Blazing Cloud, and in her spare

time works to diversify the Ruby on Rails community with a focus on outreach to women. In keeping with her belief that programming is a life skill, she also regularly volunteers teaching programming to kids. Sarah believes that open source software provides solid technical foundations and compelling business models. She is an expert with Ruby and Rails and is on the OpenLaszlo core team.

In both technical and leadership roles, Sarah has been developing

commercial software since 1990 when she co-founded CoSA (the Company of Science & Art), which originated After Effects. She began focusing on Internet software as an engineer on Macromedia's Shockwave team in 1995. She led the development of the Shockwave Multiuser Server, and later the Flash Media Server and Flash video. An industry veteran who has also worked at Adobe, Aldus, Apple, and Laszlo Systems, Sarah was named one of the top 25 women of the web by SF WoW (San Francisco Women of the Web) in 1998.

Presenting: Mobile Ruby on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 04:20 PM

Shawn Anderson @ Atomic Object /

Shawn Anderson is a software developer for Atomic Object, and has been working with Ruby for over four years; loving every minute! He has been working with Rubygame for over a year and has developed an open source game development library that uses it [1], as well as various small games and toys. Shawn taught hands on class at Scale 7x called "Ruby 101" that taught beginners how to get started with Ruby. Coming off the success of last year's packed lab hes ready to turn up the fun and focus on video game development with open source!

[1] http://shawn42.github.com/gamebox/

Presenting: Pew Pew: Writing Games with Ruby on Friday, February 19, 2010 @ 09:00 AM

Dave Astels @ Engine Yard / Coach

Dave Astels (co-author of "A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming" and author of Jolt Award winning "Test-driven Development: A Practical Guide") has over a quarter of a decade of experience creating software, mostly with object-oriented technologies. Dave has been studying, practicing, teaching, and coaching XP and Agile Processes since 1998. Dave has spent time working for companies such as

TogetherSoft and ThoughWorks, as well as being an independent consultant specializing in Ruby and Rails.

Currently Dave works for Engine Yard, and dabbles with OSX and iPhone programming using ObjectiveC as well as MacRuby. Dave is also diving into functional programming and learning Haskell.

Dave is the earliest proponent, contributor, and an avid user of RSpec. He attends, and speaks at, a variety of conferences globally.

Presenting: A New Look at Software Development: What will the next 10 years bring? on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 03:30 PM

Joe Damato @ http://timetobleed.com / hacker

I graduated as a computer science and cognitive science double major in 2007 from CMU. During college I worked on a variety of startups with close friends and I participated in Y-Combinator during the summer of 2007.

Afterwards, I began working as a Member of Technical Staff at VMWare’s Boston office in the Driver Infrastructure Group (at heart I am an OS guy). I worked with a lot of really smart engineers and I learned enormous amounts about operating systems, device drivers, and of course, virtualization.

I recently left VMWare after working there for little over a year and I am currently living in the Bay Area working on startup stuff yet again.

I am always interested in meeting new people who are working on cool stuff or who just want to chat about tech stuff.

Presenting: Everything you ever wanted to know about threads and fibers, but were afraid to ask. on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 11:45 AM

JR Fent @ TechConf, LLC / Partner

Hello! If I was going to introduce myself I'd say that I am 1/2 Geek and 1/2 Recruiter. I'm passionate about technology and I really enjoy the relationships that I have within the Web Application Developers community in the West.

Presenting: Welcome on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 09:00 AM Wine Fest on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 08:00 PM

Aman Gupta @ /

Aman is a serial entrepreneur, ruby hacker and a recent winner of a

Ruby Heroes award. He currently maintains the EventMachine project and various other gems that help build high-performance distributed and asynchronous systems in ruby, including em-mysql, em-spec, jsSocket and amqp.

Most recently, Aman has been hacking on performance improvements to

MRI, and tools for the VM such as perftools.rb, a sampling profiler for ruby code based on google-perftools, and gdb.rb, a MRI specific version of gdb.

Presenting: Garbage Collection and the Ruby Heap on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 02:40 PM

Arun Gupta @ Sun Microsystems / GlassFish Evangelist

Arun Gupta is a GlassFish Evangelist working at Sun Microsystems. Arun has over 13 years of experience in the software industry working in various technologies, Java(TM) platform, and several web-related technologies. In his current role, he works very closely to create and foster the community around GlassFish. He has participated in several standard bodies and worked amicably with members from other companies. He has been with the Java EE team since it’s inception. And since then he has contibuted to ll Java EE releases.

Presenting: Run your Rails, Merb, Sinatra, any Rack-based framework on GlassFish on Friday, February 19, 2010 @ 02:00 PM

Richard Kilmer @ InfoEther, Inc. / CEO

Rich co-founded InfoEther as a for-profit company to focus on applying Ruby in business. He also co-founded Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit promoting Ruby, where he is an active board member today and a leading contributor in the Ruby open-source community. Prior to InfoEther, Rich founded and served as CTO of Roku Technologies, one of the first peer-to-peer solutions companies and an early adopter of Java. In his 20 years as a software technologist, he has been a sales engineer, designer, consultant and a systems security manager in the U.S. Air Force at the Pentagon. He is an internationally known speaker at software technology conferences.

Presenting: Keynote address on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 05:10 PM

Ari Lerner @ AT&T Interactive / Lead Software Engineer

See me on github

Presenting: Get off the server, and into the cloud on Friday, February 19, 2010 @ 02:00 PM

Tyler McMullen @ Scribd / Engineer

I'm a Senior Developer at Scribd.com. I work on a wide variety of problems at Scribd... Rails stuff, text analysis, and systems programming all often end up on my plate. Basically, I love any problem that involves interesting data structures or large amounts of data.

I am a self-taught programmer, having picked up QBasic at the age of 11. I've been fortunate enough to work with groups of incredibly smart programmers who've helped me improve for the last 8 years. I hopped on the Rails bandwagon early on pre-1.0 and have been working at Rails-based companies ever since.

Presenting: Alternative Data Structures in Ruby on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 10:05 AM

Sarah Mei @ Pivotal Labs / Software Engineer

Sarah Mei has spent most of the last dozen years writing code, and most of the last three doing Ruby. In 2009, she co-founded RailsBridge, a nonprofit dedicated to making the Ruby and Rails communities welcoming to all. Since then, her Open Workshop project has sponsored five events in three cities and introduced over 200 people to Rails, Ruby, and in some cases, programming. Sarah works at Pivotal Labs and has two kids, a cat, seventeen computers in various states of repair, and one very understanding husband.

Presenting: Indoctrinating the Next Generation: Teaching Ruby to Kids on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 10:55 AM

Alf Mikula @ AT&T Interactive / Sr. Software Engineer

Alf builds Rails applications full time, and has played key roles in travel.latimes.com and yp.com site development. He also spends a lot of time building Rails applications in his spare time, mostly on PromoteGo.org. He's the current organizer of the monthly LA Ruby Meetup, and a shameless promoter of the classic Asian game of Go, and works on Team Atari at a large company that released yp.com.

Presenting: Introduction to Ruby on Rails on Friday, February 19, 2010 @ 02:00 PM

Luigi Montanez @ Sunlight Labs / Software Developer

Luigi is a Software Developer with the Sunlight Labs, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization focused on making government more transparent and accountable through technology. He has been a Rubyist since 2006. Link: http://sunlightlabs.com

Presenting: Civic Hacking on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 01:50 PM

Tim Morgan @ Scribd / Senior Developer

I'm a Senior Developer at Scribd.com, hired under the unofficial title

of "Rails guru." I've been doing Ruby on Rails since version 0.8, and I'm known as "the walking Rails API" around the office. (Though sometimes I cheat and tell them to check the actual API.) Before working at Scribd I worked at Tickle (a division of Monster) doing Rails and Java, and before that at Amazon.com doing C and Perl. I got my B.S. in Computer Science and Physics at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

Working at Scribd is a wake-to-sleep job, but on the weekends I'm a

private pilot, and I have a Rails site at www.terminalprocedures.com for other pilots. My most popular open-source project is Autumn, the Rails-like framework for writing IRC bots.

Presenting: Oh S***: How to bring a big Rails website down (and how not to) on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 09:15 AM

Joe O'Brien @ EdgeCase / Artisan

Joe is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.

Presenting: Ruby Koans (Introduction to Ruby) on Friday, February 19, 2010 @ 09:00 AM

Aaron Patterson @ AT&T Interactive / Miami Vice Principal Senior Facebook Integration Engineering Manager Elect

I am a mild mannered Ruby programmer by day, and a Michael McDonald impersonator by night. I hope to use this website to write about things that interest me, and will hopefully interest you.

Presenting: Nokogiri & Mechanize on Friday, February 19, 2010 @ 02:00 PM

Coby Randquist @ AT&T Interactive / Executive Director Web Development

Coby has been working in the software development world for a little over 20 years, from his first independent job working for the Small Business Administration building apps with Clipper '87, to over seeing the building and maintenance of YELLOWPAGES.COM, he has focused on how to add value to the businesses he has been involved with solve problems with the application of technology.

Currently he is Executive Director Web Development for AT&T Interactive, Principal at Confreaks, LLC, and a partner in TechConf, LLC (organizers of LA Ruby Conference). He has been actively involved with the Ruby community since 2006, and helped revitalize the Salt Lake Ruby Brigade, and then the LA Ruby Meetup. In his spare time he ... oh wait spare time?

Presenting: Welcome on Saturday, February 20, 2010 @ 09:00 AM

Jim Weirich @ EdgeCase / Chief Scientist

Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years, with experience that ranges from real-time data acquisition for jet engine testing to image processing and web services for the financial industry. Although Jim has experience in C++ and Java/J2EE technologies, his real passion is about delivering business value in a timely and efficient manner, and one of the best ways of doing just that is leveraging the power of Ruby and Rails. Jim is very active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

Presenting: Ruby Koans (Introduction to Ruby) on Friday, February 19, 2010 @ 09:00 AM

Announcement

LA Ruby Conference 2010

Sponsors

Speakers