Day 2 at SD West

First I've got to cover the night before.

The conference director was gracious enough to let me crash the conference speaker reception last night, which was the customary blend of excellent food, free beer, and really, really good conversation with some real luminaries in this field.

Then I overheard the director say that they were going to have to cancel a session Wednesday. It was unfortunate that with their brand-new Ruby track, the session introducing the language would have to be cancelled because the speaker couldn't make it!

"Ruby?" I said, fueled by an Anchor Steam on not enough food (yet). "Heck, I could do a talk on Ruby."

"Why are you all looking at me like that?"

So it was back to the motel room, haul out the laptop, and start pulling together a 90-minute presentation. It's 10:00 PM, the session starts in 10 and a half hours, go!

I said "Umm" way too much, but did not crash and die. I got to work in the Muppets Swedish Chef in order to show off Ruby's facility to reopen classes and add methods at runtime (I chose to just hack Object). Astoundingly, without having rehearsed the talk even once, I finished up at 86 minutes, just in time to read the show announcements. Hey, that was actually fun!

Next up was Alastair Cockburn on Crystal Clear and its related methodologies, which seemed to make so much sense with so little dogma that we're going to have to try some of that stuff out.
From there, I went to hear Ken Pugh talk about concurrency in Ruby, which sounded so cool that I wanted to run back and try it out, except for all the wonderful ways to shoot oneself in the head provided by threading.

In half an hour the Excellence In Programming and Jolt Awards kick off. Woo and hoo! Of course, then comes the show party, which ought to be worth attending (even if briefly). At least now it's no longer a command performance for me!