TL;DR
If you watch one talk from Mountain West Ruby 2013, watch Greg Baugues: Devs and Depression.
Talks @ Mountain West Ruby Conference
Mountain West Ruby, was a great conference: lots of content and awesome people. It had one DevOps day and two Ruby days. Its presentations have recently been posted on confreaks.
There were a total of four talks by Pivots, including one by myself (in order of appearance):
- Andy Pliszka: Extending CRuby with native Graph data type.
- Matt Kocher: Ruby off the Rails: Building a distributed system in Ruby.
- Stephan Hagemann: Component-based Architectures in Ruby and Rails.
- Sarah Mei: Work, Play & Code.
What follows is the list of talks that I recommend watching.
There is one talk that I want to highlight within my list of highlights: “Devs and Depression”. It is the last one in this list and as you can guess it is not about technology. It’s different, bold, and in my opinion very important. Watch it!
Alright, here we go…
DevOps Day
Gene Kim: Why we need devops? – 30000 feet view of why devops is valuable and how to do it. It’s a 3 trillion market.
Will Farrington: Boxen: How to manage an army of laptops – Some impressive stuff github is doing for machine management.
Lindsay Holmwood: Escalating complexity: DevOps learnings from Air France 447 – Chilling: Case study of an airplane crash. Systems within complex systems. Local vs global rationality.
If you want more:
James Turnbull: Hell has frozen over: DevOps & Security – How security people should change their work and how they talk about it.
Drew Blas: Migrating a live site across the country without downtime – Actionable story on how to move data centers.
Jesse Newland: ChatOps at Github – Using hubot (in campfire chat) to manage puppet (and everything). Documenting, interacting, interfacing among remote teams.
Ruby Day 1
Yukihiro Matsumoto: Ruby 2.0 – History of Ruby and features of Ruby 2.0. Maybe don’t watch if you already know about the new features. Maybe watch it, because its Matz.
Michael Fairley: Immutable Ruby – How immutability can benefit your code.
Daniel Huckstep: Ruby Batteries Included – Don’t require gems: Use the Ruby Standard Library.
Ryan Davis: Trolls of 2013 – Not abut trolls, but implementing an interpreter in Ruby. Talk got cancelled on the first day, due to a fire alarm. Way to deal with it Ryan!
If you want more:
John Pignata: Code Smells: Your Refactoring Cheat Codes – Run through a long list of code smells and refactorings.
Ruby Day 2
Brandon Keepers: Ruby at Github – Musings on Ruby: when to use, why to use. And problems (over time) in a big setup.
Craig Kerstins: Postgres Demystified – Lots of stuff you did not know about Postgres.
Greg Baugues: Devs and Depression – Personal story of mental illness. Talks about depression and why we should be more attentive to our fellow developers.
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