The Buckblog

What an incredible weekend.

I just got back from RubyConf 2005 last night. Late. I would have blogged about it as it was occurring but I was spending every spare minute I had hacking on Rails, gearing up for the release of 1.0 RC1.

So, now that I have a minute, I figured I’d sit and write about some of my impressions.

It was definitely unforgettable. Almost 200 Rubyists packed into a conference room, Mac laptops everywhere (are you PC folks feeling any pressure to change, yet?) and ideas and code flying fast and furious. I finally got to meet most of the Rails core team face-to-face, which was a real treat. I am honored to be a part of that group.

Late nights, hacking. Every night. Combine that with early mornings (to get a decent seat) and you wind up with a real recipe for sleep deprivation.

I loved listening to Matz talk about Ruby, although it was unfortunate that so many people turned his keynote into a “why can’t you just…” session. Still, I was very impressed with how he handled that, listening to people and responding politely.

Probably the most life-changing thing that occurred at the conference was that I decided to give TextMate another try. It has certainly progressed quite a bit since I last tried it, and although I do miss the implementation of some of vim’s features (like joining the next line with the current—TextMate does it, too, but not as cleanly) I think I could grow to love TextMate. The hard part now is learning how to be effective in this new editor. Having used a mode-based editor for so long, it’s difficult to remember how to use anything else!