Jay and myself co-presented Jemini. We didn't exactly fill the room, but we got a pretty positive reception. We even got some challenging questions from the audience - people are interested in using Ruby to make games and compete with the current trendy stuff (such as using XNA to deploy on the XBox 360). Jay and I played our strengths for the talk, and I think it'll make for good material once the Confreaks videos are released. Jay even talks about releasing a standalone screencast with voiceovers on his recording. If you're thinking about live-coding for a presentation - don't. At the very least record a video of it.
I submitted the Jemini talk mostly expecting it would be rejected. My thought was to grab a projector and demonstrate in the hall anyways. I wound up doing both. Jay and I positioned our laptops with games running. We then stood about 12 feet away with XBox wireless controllers in hand. People had to cut in front of us to get by, which meant they'd notice the controllers, games, or both. We got a lot of good reception and interest from that.
I also presented Monkeybars at the request of the JRuby team for JRubyConf. This talk I felt could have used a little more preparation. I was able to demo a variety of apps and show off things that weren't covered in the RubyConf 2008 talk. One nice thing is that someone presented Rawr first - and used it to deploy a web app! As a moonlighting tool developer, it's interesting and flattering to see what people do with your creations.
For the conference itself, I sometimes thought that JRubyConf had started early. If you've been on the fence of the legitimacy of JRuby, you're running out of excuses to drink the kool-aid with the rest of us. Many of the talks mentioned JRuby in some form (if even to point out that their stuff didn't work with JRuby). By the way, 'g' works on JRuby (which I demonstrated [and Tom Enebo helped me get working]). JRuby now has some peripheral tools that are starting to mature such as Duby and Surinx. We still have some people that think that 100% Ruby is still too much Java (huh?), but there's still some folks that think the Earth is flat too (:
Other Ruby implementations such as MacRuby, and IronRuby are all doing well in their respective realms as well. If I saw correctly, some Ruby scripts were evaled against an existing C# app and the Ruby lib was able to override a lot of behavior. You can do this with JRuby too, but the app has to be designed for it. I'm under the impression this app wasn't. This aligns with what the DLR is up to. I didn't see Rubinius really appear on my radar, but I'm not really watching for it.
Overall I wouldn't go to RubyConf unless you were presenting. All of the material becomes available a few weeks afterwards online. You can establish relationships with library maintainers (who are universally eager to have more users) online as well. As far as the Ruby elites, the Ivory Tower goes, I submit the value there is less than nothing. This is why local/regional conferences sprout up everywhere. I see people doing cooler stuff at our local user groups than I see at these conferences. The local connections are far more valuable and productive than having Matz take your card. All of this said, it's still a pretty fun experience.
Bringing my wife Stacey along was a good move - not just for brownie points. She helped keep my sleep schedule anchored to something reasonable and helped snap my head out of the tech space so I could retain optimal sanity. Jay brought his wife Diana along too. While we were at the conference, they went out and had fun together. It seemed we weren't the only ones with this configuration too.
