CodeMash, coming up next month, is an unusual style of conference: its stated goal is to bring together programmers of different disciplines, to capture the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas and techniques between these diverse worlds. Though for all I know, perhaps the result will be hallway fist-o-cuffs between the C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python developers who attend. Either way should make for an interesting couple of days.
I’m giving a talk titled “Ruby Isn’t Just About Rails,” in which I’ll cover the explosion of web frameworks, test frameworks, ORMs, and other pieces of the stack which has occurred in the Ruby world in the past two years. Like Merb, Sinatra, DataMapper, Sequel, RSpec, and whatever else I can cram into the hour. It’s been great fun watching the Ruby ecosystem mature, and I look forward to trying to put this history into a story which will be compelling to non-Ruby coders.