The agony and the ectasy (of RubyConf proposals, that is)

July 1st, 2006

Wearing my Ruby Central director’s hat:

We’ve received a record-smashing 73 talk proposals for RubyConf 2006. That’s more than twice the number we got last year—and last year was about double the previous high.

It’s absolutely great to see all the interesting work that’s being done. I’m feeling buzzed and inspired in a way I usual am after RubyConf.

It’s also agonizing to have to select not much more than a handful of talks. We’ll do it, and the program will be great, but it’s not easy.

RubyConf is a gem of a conference: small (not tiny, but small compared to many), one-track, intense, fun, collegial, coherent, unified. We want it to stay that way; it’s an event many people look forward to and treasure.

The fact that we’ve received 73 proposals doesn’t change that—but it does set us the challenge, as an organization, of looking for more and more ways to get the community together and to let people know what others are doing.

Posted by dblack Filed in Events, Ruby

5 Responses to “The agony and the ectasy (of RubyConf proposals, that is)”

  1. mfp Says:
    July 1st, 2006 at 01:20 PM

    [This his a reply to “Why I am conservative about changes to Ruby”, but you disabled comments on that entry, so…]

    > “The → lambda arrow has been dropped from the development branch, which is great news.)”

    No, -> is not dead yet; only ->{} as a block is. <pre> $ ruby19 -v -e “p ->(a){a+1}.call(1)” ruby 1.9.0 (2006-06-11) [i686-linux] 2 </pre>

  2. mfp Says:
    July 1st, 2006 at 01:22 PM

    öö please try to read behind the utterly broken formatting

  3. James Says:
    July 1st, 2006 at 01:41 PM

    What’s the process for selecting the conference talks?

  4. dblack Says:
    July 1st, 2006 at 05:40 PM

    We look through the proposals and try to come up with the best program :-)

    That’s really about it. We look for good proposals, interesting juxtapositions of papers, and as good an overall experience as we can.

  5. James Says:
    July 4th, 2006 at 09:41 PM

    > We look for good proposals, interesting juxtapositions of papers, and as good an overall experience as we can.

    So the stories about darts and Jägermeister are largely unfounded?

    :)

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