State Of Flux

Rubinius is a reimplementation of the Ruby interpreter initiated by Evan Phoenix who has recently been hired by Engine Yard. Engine Yard is a hosting company that is positioning itself as the hosting provider of choice for Ruby applications by a variety of developer focused strategies. In an effort to raise their profile and gain credibility in the Ruby community they’ve hired Evan to work full-time on the development of Rubinius. They’ve also hired the excellent Ezra Zygmuntowicz of camping fame which gives them huge cred in the developer community. Not only are they just latching onto established efforts, they are creating new markets by going after the shared hosting crew by developing mod_rubinius . I would guess that the benefits are twofold – they look like nice guys by giving back to the community, but they also create a very easy path for them to upsell shared hosting into VPS. Everyone wins when this kind of effort is put into a business model.

Evan and Eric Hodel are out in Australia for the Rubinius Sprint set up by Marcus Crafter and fellow Engine Yarder Dylan Egan . In a side trip Evan came to Melbourne and spent three hours explaining how Rubinius worked and answering a heap of really interesting technical questions from the Melbourne crew before heading out for a few quiet (5am) drinks.

I’ve been a bit absent with my blogging so I’ve got a few retrospective entries for you.

BarCamp Melbourne : 60 people, 25 talks and an amazing day of interdisciplinary cahoots unorganized by Ben Balbo ! What I loved about BarCamp:http://barcamp.org/ was the range of presentations – everything from programming, databases and information modelling through to media centers, industrial relations, social activities and a hell of a lot of fun.

I’d like to give special mention to Paul Fenwick’s hilarious and poignant talk on “An Illustrated History of Failure”. He managed to show why testing costs – and quantified it. It was a showcase of brilliant execution on a topic which would, with an average presenter, make you groan.

Other outstanding talks where Andy G’s “OpenLazlo GUI, jiggy itouch GUI, openmaji” and Brent Snook’s “Lowering Usability Hurdles with the Wii”. Very, very cool stuff. In reality all the talks were excellent and had a lot to offer. I can’t wait to see the what the next BarCamp has to offer.

I was lucky enough to win a copy of The CSS Anthology from SitePoint:http://sitepoint.com/ for my talk on Monkey Patching (which I’d given previously as the Ruby Nuby night a few months ago). The after event drinks were in North Melbourne, with the suds provided by Microsoft

You can keep up with the activities on by checking out the BarCampMelbourne2008 tag on da internets .