My First Tech Conference

A few weeks ago, I attended my first Tech Conference.The conference was called GoRuCo - (Gotham Ruby Conference). It was a very nice conference (well, don't have anything really to compare it to). I learned about some interesting ideas and projects that are going in the Ruby community. I was hoping to learn a little core Ruby stuff, but I still learned a lot.

Some of my thoughts on the presentations:

Camping - It is a MVC based lightweight framework Microframework . Initally I didn't really see the point of the project and a couple people I spoke with also had the same thoughts. However, a few days later at work, it dawned to me how it would be useful in creating a simple a frontend to a small internal db. Camping Project

Adhearsion - It got me psyched up to want to go play with VOIP.

Business Natural Language(BNL) Ruby Systems - It was very interesting presentation on how to create a BNL. I was kinda of shocked in what approach they used to convert "sentences" into Ruby code(think simple string munipulations). I definitely want to try it and see if I have an opportunity to implement it on a project. Check out the presenter's homepage for more details.

Also, did I mention that the conference was held at the Google's NYC office? It is huge! It fills a full city avenue block.

Photos of the conference taken by other people - you can spot me in a couple of the photos if you look closely enough.

And what is Ruby? Well, hopefully that will be a future posting. =)

Workspace 2.0

I upgraded my workspace at work yesterday. I got two 20"-wide monitors and running them in dual view mode. It is really great. I know, I know, people have been doing to quite a while. Well now, I'm finally one of them! And for those on 2+ monitors are not using UltraMon, then you aren't taking advantage of your setup.

It has taken a little bit of time to get use to, but I love it. It will make development a lot easier now that I don't have to Alt-Tab all the time. These are a couple of things I see that will be helpful right away.
Examples:

• Reading the API guide on one monitor while having my IDE on the monitor.
  
• Viewing the same website using IE and Firefox side by side.
  
• Debugging windows on one side and the program on the other.
  
• IDE on one, Outlook/Trillian on the other.
  
• Pretend I'm at the beach.. =)

There are probably other ways that will help be in being efficient while working. Now, the question is if I should get another one? Hmmm....