00:00:12.629
Okay, so welcome to something brand new! In this slot, as you've seen over the last couple of days, we've tried to do something different. What we decided to do for the last day is to have a sort of ignite-style set of talks. Ignite-style talks are where the presenters have 20 slides that auto-advance. They cannot control the slides; they're just along for the ride, so they better keep going.
00:00:36.150
In this particular instance, rather than giving the presenters an open frame to talk about whatever they wanted, we asked them to speak a little bit about RubyConf and the Ruby community specifically. This works better in the morning. A lot of you are experiencing this as your first RubyConf, and there's a lot of history to RubyConf: what it used to do, where it is now, and how it has gotten to this point.
00:01:03.720
It often gets lost in the day-to-day of everyone having a good time at every conference. We asked the presenters to speak on that topic, touching on different aspects of it. So, I don't think I need to set it up any more than that. Without further ado, I would remind all presenters to state their name at the beginning of their talk. Please don't forget to say who you are. I will start off with our first presenter, Rich Kilmer.
00:01:58.350
Thank you! Alright, so we all have our own emoji; this is mine! Evan chose them for us. So I'm Rich Kilmer, and I'm going to talk to you about the foundations of our community and RubyConf. You know, in the early days of Ruby, as Matz talked about, Ruby started in 1993 when it began to come over to the United States.
00:02:51.870
We had our Ruby talk list, which was primarily an English list. The early part of Ruby talk was still in Japanese, but a lot of it was in English. We had the Ruby Application Archive, which was basically an index of libraries you could download. Then, we held our first conference in Tampa.
00:03:40.150
The Tampa conference was the first Ruby conference, and it had about 40 people there. It coincided with Uppsala, which was a total nerd conference. In fact, the first two years of RubyConf coincided with Uppsala. People came for Uppsala but then started attending this RubyConf event.
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One of the things presented to us at that Ruby conference was our dock, which Dave Thomas created to help develop the Pickaxe book. This was great because we were trying to understand what Ruby was and what it was going to become. In the last session of that conference, we formed small teams to figure out what Ruby was going to be used for.
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The next conference was held in Seattle in 2002. That year, we decided that conferences would move to different cities every year, never to repeat. Although we did not succeed entirely at that, we tried to bounce them around. Seattle marked the first Ruby Central conference.
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Ruby Central was formed by Chad Fowler, myself, Dave Thomas, and David Allen Black. One interesting moment from this conference was the appearance of a guy named Yahm; he introduced us to the Amall, and I loved it so much that I converted my project before my talk to use YaML. My project was based on Freebase.
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Dave Thomas talked about his vacation and how he wrote a 25,000 line Ruby accounting system. We were amazed that someone actually wrote such a substantial application in Ruby. Then, we moved over to Austin the following year. Austin was a significant year in 2003 because it was the first time we weren’t alongside Uppsala.
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At this conference, Ruby Forge was introduced. This was the first place where code could be uploaded and version controlled, and our community began to share libraries. Jim Wyrick introduced the concept of Rake, which was demoed after he had started writing it that morning. Not to be outdone, that night we started developing RubyGems together.
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RubyGems was born that night despite the fact that we didn’t have version control or Wi-Fi. We passed a USB stick around and committed code all night. The next year, the conference was in Virginia, near Washington, D.C. which marked the first year Ruby Central had an official sponsor.
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My company managed to sponsor the dinner for that conference. During this conference, YARV was introduced, which eventually got committed to trunk years later as a means of improving Ruby’s performance. That day, Ishiq came and discussed Ruby on Rails, which sparked questioning regarding what the killer application would be for Ruby.
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Rails became the killer app for Ruby, but our community remains its foundation. The community is who we are. I want to recognize those who are no longer with us, but also those who are here for the first time. Everyone who has come has contributed to our story.
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So remember, you all make this community, and your part is foundational. Thank you!
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Okay, so that's my emoji, the geeky face! I’m Nadia from London, UK, and I’ll be speaking about how you can get involved in the Ruby Central conferences and community. Everyone should join the conference!
00:12:25.220
So Matt asked us all to raise our hands if it’s our first time here or if we’re first-time speakers. If it had been two years ago at RailsConf, I would have raised my hand for both.
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Since speaking at RailsConf in 2015, I was eager to engage again and have also volunteered for the RubyConf committee twice. I hope you're all enjoying the talks! However, just a year before my first speaking experience, I wasn’t even part of the tech community yet, just learning to code.
