Notes from Rubyfringe
* Dan Grigsby - Don't work for the man, be a programmer/entrepreneur instead. Treat each venture as an experiment and don't be shy about terminating the ones that don't work. You'll strike out a lot but eventually hit a home run.
* Yueda Katz - Living on the edge is fun, but also dangerous. Finding a balance between the cutting edge and the bleeding edge is the trick.
* Luke Franci - There are methods for testing other than code-oriented ones like unit testing. RCov doesn't mean much. Use QA, usability tests, and code reviews for well-rounded coverage.
* Obie Fernandez - To be successful at consulting, watch the balance of power in the relationship with your clients. Most Rails freelancers are charging too little - he recommends no less than $100/hr.
* Matt Todd - Don't be afraid to dive in with both feet. Make mistakes, learn from them. Pick good problems to solve.
* Jeremy McAnally - Frameworks are getting fat. Frameworks should be specific. Don't use Rails (or any other framework) outside of its domain.
* Hampton Catlin - Javascript is a good general purpose language, but terrible in the browser. Add-on libraries like Prototype and JQuery are just band-aids on this problem. The client-side language should be tightly coupled to the DOM, like CSS. He proposes Jabl.
* Giles Bowket - Fuck the man, fuck the mainstream. Programming is a tool to do your art. His art is music, his tool is Ruby, and the result is Arcaeopteryx. (Giles stole the show with this talk. He ran like twice as long as his alloted time but we were all so into it that no one minded.)
* Damien Katz - If you want to become the guy that gets paid to build cool things, take a risk: start by making something cool without any plan for how to get paid for it. (He did that, and now IBM pays him to work on CouchDB and contribute it to the Apache Foundation.) Also, Erlang is sweet.
* Reginald Braithwaite - It's too bad Ruby isn't more like Lisp or Haskell.
* Tom Preston-Warner - The scientific method rules, use it for coding (and life). Ruby 1.8 has weird memory leak bugs. Github now has a git-powered pastie site, gist.github.com. Also, Erlang is sweet.
* Blake Mizerany - Sinatra is a framework for fast, small web services. Routers are unnecessary obfuscation; treat a web resource url like you would a function name, and address it directly.
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