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The planning for Nordic Ruby 2011 is in full progress. If you are interested in sponsoring, please take a look at the sponsorship prospectus on the site; http://nordicruby.org.

Last year was a great success with a hundred attendees from Sweden, other Nordic and European countries and the USA.

We will continue with the much appreciated concept of 30 minute talks and 30 minute breaks, a half and half conference. This gives you a great opportunity to meet and socialise with a lot of people in the community from all around the world. There will off course be great speakers as well!

We can already announce Chad Fowler as a speaker! Chad Fowler is program chair for RubyConf and RailsConf, and author of The Passionate Programmer. We are very glad to have him.

The conference will be held at the same great venue as last year. The dinner party will be held at a new place and we’ll have some other new details. More information in the future.

You can download the wrap from Nordic Ruby 2010 on the website and also look at the sponsorship prospectus. The full site for Nordic Ruby 2011 will be launched at the end of January.

June 16th - 18th, save the date for Nordic Ruby 2011 in Gothenburg, Sweden. (The conference days are on Friday and Saturday).

Please contact us at info@nordicruby.org if you are interested in sponsoring the event.

Two weeks ago, Jonas and I were in New Orleans for the 10th annual RubyConf. This was my 2nd RubyConf, but I had a very different experience this time. This time I was one of the speakers. And I was giving two presentations.

The Front End Testing Frontier

One of the presentations was an extended version of the Front End Testing Frontier presentation I gave at Mountain.rb in October. This time I was fortunate enough to have my colleague Jonas Nicklas as a co-presenter. Jonas is the author of the testing libraries Capybara and Evergreen, our primary tools for JavaScript testing at Elabs.

I’ve uploaded the slides from the Front End Testing Frontier presentation, but they’re pretty sparse. Video should be available in a few weeks, and I’ll update this post then.

Socialist Software Development

My other presentation was titled Socialist Software Development. I came up with the title after seeing a clip from The Daily Show about socialism in Sweden. I saw some similarities between the principles of socialism and agile development, and since it seems most Americans are terrified by the mere mention of socialism, I thought it would be fun to go to the US and talk about it. The essence of my talk came from this passage from the British Labour Party constitution:

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that, by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create, for each of us, the means to realise our true potential, and, for all of us, a community in which power, wealth, and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.

While I drew some inspiration from my flippant title, I mostly talked about how Sharing is Caring, and how important that is in software development.

Giving such a “soft” talk was quite a bit harder than giving a technical presentation, but I was very happy with how it went. I’ve posted the slides for the Socialist Software Development presentation as well, and I’ll update when the video is online.

What’s Next?

I’ve been to a lot of conferences this year, and it’s been great presenting at Mountain.rb and RubyConf. The next conference on our schedule is the Scottish Ruby Conference in April next year. All the Elabs developers will be there, and I’m really looking forward to that. Then there’s our own conference, Nordic Ruby, in June. This year was amazing, and it looks like the one next year will be even better.

I don’t have any confirmed speaking events for next year, but I would love to do a couple and continue to improve as a speaker. But I think I’ll limit it to one presentation per conference. Giving two at RubyConf was a bit overwhelming.

Today we are 4 people at the office, half of the crew. Jimmy and Johannes, our designers, left on Monday for Build which is a design conference in Belfast. And yesterday CJ and Jonas flew to RubyConf in New Orleans were they will be giving the talk: The Front End Testing Frontier. CJ will also give a talk about Socialist Software Development.

On Tuesday we had a short but very appreciated visit by Dave Hoover, who flew by Gothenburg to see us and join Got.rb in the evening. Early on Wednesday he continued his journey by train to Malmö and Øredev Developer Conference.

A quiet day at the office.

After attending and organizing it is finally time for the next step, to speak at a conference, two actually, with three talks. Dive in head first. CJ will be speaking at Mountain.rb and RubyConf.

First: Mountain.rb in Boulder, Colorado, October 6-8
The Talk: The Front End Testing Frontier

While most Ruby developers are very familiar with testing their code, frontend and JavaScript-testing is still a new frontier for many. This talk will show you how to easily write and run JavaScript integration tests with Capybara and Cucumber, and unit tests with Evergreen and Jasmine. The goal is to get you excited about frontend testing, and point you in the right direction to get started yourself!

Second and Third: RubyConf in New Orleans, November 11-13
Talk #1: The Front End Testing Frontier, extended, with co-presenter Jonas Nicklas
Talk #2: Socialist Software Development

Socialism is often portrayed as pure evil by US media (hello Fox News), yet many socialist countries are ranked as some of the best countries in the world (Newsweek). So maybe it’s not all bad? If you look at job listings for software developers, it seem like a lot of companies are looking for “programmer rock stars”, “coding ninjas”, etc. There is a romantic notion about the ultra productive independent super developer. This talk examines software development from a socialist perspective.

Might we get better results and provide more value if we set aside our egos and work together?

One of my highlights of last year was going to BizConf, so I was very happy to be able to go back to Amelia Island last week for the 2nd annual BizConf.

Photo by Obie Fernandez

For me, the greatest part about attending a conference is hanging out with lots of great people. This is especially true about BizConf, which just as last year attracted a bunch of smart and interesting people who were eager to share their experiences. I learned just as much from them as from the presenters.

David Allen shows how you feel when you’re not “Getting Things Done”. Photo by Obie Fernandez.

One of the many excellent presenters was David Allen (above), the creator and best-selling author of Getting Things Done (which all attendees got a copy of). David gave a really inspiring keynote and an engaging workshop about how and why you should do GTD.

Corey Haines moderated the Software Craftsmanship panel. Photo by Obie Fernandez.

One of my favourite moments of the conference was the panel on Software Craftsmanship in Small Business. It was lead by Corey Haines, who was kind enough to invite me to be on it together with Gustin Prudner, Paul Pagel and Obie Fernandez. It was a real honour to be on the panel alongside such esteemed colleagues, and we had some great discussions.

Conference pool parties are awesome. Photo by Lan Bui.

Fitting to a conference in Florida, BizConf finished with a great pool party. Relaxed atmosphere, good food and drinks, great people and lots of fun. That pretty much sums up the whole conference. I’m already looking forward to next year!