A few days ago I got back from Japan, where I gave 2 talks – one at TechEd Japan and one at RubyKaigi. Honestly, it was a breathtaking experience for me.
First of all, Japan… it’s so different! someone even called it “an alternate universe”. Japanese people are so kind and so well-behaved. And everything is clean. Sooooo freaking clean!!!! I must recommend you to visit Japan if you haven’t don’t it already. It is an experience you wouldn’t want to miss.
Secondly, I had a unique opportunity to speak both at a Microsoft and a Ruby conferences at the same week and see the different audience. They’re all developers and yet they are so different! Microsofties are the responsible grown ups and Rubyists are the rebellious teenagers. It was amazing to see the differences. Anyway, I had a blast in both conferences and met some outstanding people!
Before I move to the content of my talks, I’d like to personally thank Shozo Arai for having me at TechEd and helping me with my RubyKaigi talk and to thank Ayumu Aizawa for having me at RubyKaigi. You people rock!
And to the content of my talks (I’ll add them to the presentations page soon too)… The first one was TechEd:
The conference took place at the Yokohama Conference Center and I gotta say – Yokohama is a beautiful place. For instance, this was the view from my hotel room:
During the conference I also played Microsoft Kinect for the first time, which was AWESOME. I want one. If you wanna buy me one, please do.
In addition, I participated in a special MVPs launch (Japan has 200 MVPs!) where I was introduced to everyone. It was very cool and I got to meet some exciting people there.
Anyway… I also had a session there named “Let’s Dynamic – IronRuby and the .NET Framework” (that’s my translation to the Japanese name :-) ). It was the first time for me to have a translator. I had to stop every 1-2 sentences and let him translate. It was quite an experience! but I had fun and the audience seemed interested too :-)
These are the slides:
If you’re interested in one of the demos, please let me know and I’ll upload them. I’m just too lazy to do that now :-) I know the session was recorded on video too. I guess you’ll be able to view it on the conference site - http://www.microsoft.com/japan/teched/2010/.
From TechEd I moved to RubyKaigi, which took place at Tsukuba (2 hour train drive away from Yokohama):
It was the first Ruby conference for me so I had to understand what was going on first. They had these cool whiteboards where you could write various things. For example, your favorite method and favorite programming language (C# made it to the list!). Click on the picture to view in a bigger size:
They also had a huge map of the world and everyone wrote where they came from. I was the only one from Israel:
During the party of the first night I also got to meet some famous people (famous at least for Ruby developers!) like Matz (the creator of the Ruby language) and Chad Fowler (author of “The Passionate Programmer” and one of the organizers of RubyConf) as well as other awesome people.
Anyway, I had a session here too! Its name was “IronRuby – What’s in it for Rubyists?” and its goal was to show Rubyists how they can take advantage of IronRuby and different .NET frameworks like WPF, Silverlight and others.
These are the slides:
Again, If you’re interested in one of the demos, please let me know and I’ll upload them.
The session was recorded as well and can be found at http://rubykaigi.tdiary.net.
In conclusion, I had a blast!!! Japan is an incredible country and the conferences were outstanding! Hopefully I’ll get to visit there again in the future.
Arigato!
Shay.