eurucamp 2012

This weekend the eurucamp 2012 took place in Berlin in a hotel located directly at the lake Müggelsee. On Friday, there were also the JRubyConf EU and some workshops, while the talks were held on Saturday and Sunday attended by approximately 150 persons. On Saturday:

1. Sinatra in 8 Lines: A really entertaining and not so serious talk about code obfuscation with Almost Sinatra as an example.
2. ZeroMQ: Scriptable Sockets: An introduction into ZeroMQ and communication in distributed systems in general. Here you can find examples of concepts and usage patterns.
3. Slanger & Data Warehousing: About WebSockets and the message and subscription model of Slanger.
4. Ruby on the Command Line: Tips and tricks concerning Ruby command line scripts, e.g. Trollop for command line option parsing.
5. Writing a Rails Engine: A brief history of Rails evolution and an introduction into creating Rails engines and plugins.
6. Do I need DI?: Some general remarks about software design, abstraction and modularization. 
7. RubyMotion: An introduction into Ruby on top of iOS including some demos.
8. A fishbowl discussion that started with SPDY and push and moved to Ruby refinements and operators in Ruby.
9. Idempotence as the holy grail of scaling: Functional idempotency as an important base for scalability.
10. Clean Documentation: A talk about testing your docs by reviews, using references to avoid redundant contents and README Driven Development.
11. Superheroes can do it and so can you!: An entertaining and interesting report about a project in Papua New Guinea to preserve the local languages by recording stories and songs with the help of a mobile app and a distributed synchronization infrastructure.
12. Living in the data mapping world: An introduction into DataMapper, an ORM, and an outlook of future developments.

On Sunday:

1. All you need is love: About art, motivation and passion as important support for creative work like software development, but also about analytic skills and discipline. Performed as a two-person discussion.
2. Complex Calculations Within a Web Request: A presentation about caching techniques and optimizing Ruby code for speed (including a demo of RubyJS).
3. Lightning Talks:
1. A short talk about mock objects.
2. A presentation of the RFID tracking system used at eurucamp.
3. A presentation of the book "Deploying with JRuby".
4. About how to extend an engine's views.
5. A short introduction of an RSpec-like test framework in Python.
6. Pros and cons concerning MongoDB (cons: fragmentation by deletion, BSON, sharding and the global write lock; pros: replication, schemaless, secondary indexes).
7. A talk about learning and training in general.
4. Create your own tools (and share them)!: A eulogy about open source and sharing tools.
5. Monolithic vs Distributed Software: No Holy Grails: Pros and cons of modularization and how to decide when to use or not.
6. When Not to Use Object-Oriented Techniques: A comparison between object-oriented programming and functional programming by example.
7. Polyglot Rails Applications in Rubinius: An introduction into Rubinius and the motivation behind it.
8. Off the Tracks - Challenging the Rails Mindset: Various recipes for Rails projects like using POROs (plain old Ruby objects) or decorators.

You can find additional information (including some presentation slides) about the talks here.
The conference ended with a gig of Nomataras.