This past weekend I attended the Ruby Hoedown in Hunstville, AL. As one of the members of the talk selection committee, I don’t mind saying at all that I thought the line up was fantastic.

I really liked Chris Wanstrath’s anti-keynote. I say anti-keynote, because he basically wrote an essay and then presented it to us without slides. He said later that he was a better writer than speaker; and I’d say it definitely worked. The essay was funny and motivating. I couldn’t do justice trying to summarize it, so make sure to check out the video when it shows up on Confreaks, hopefully next week. (Though not bringing GitHub t-shirts was a fail)

We got a two-for-one talk from Rein’s talk about best practice patterns. The best part was the first talk, which covered such topics as unfactoring: undoing common refactorings for job security. After all if you refactor your code so anybody can understand it, then anybody can maintain it too, so you’re programming yourself out of a job. Bad idea. And if you DRY up your code, you will be able to add new features more quickly. But why would you want to do that if you get paid by the hour?

The lightning talk that really stood out to me was Bryan Liles TATFT version of his testing talk. The slides for the whole thing are up on his site, so it’s worth looking through while waiting for the video.

Another high point was Giles Bowkett’s talk on Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator. I loved the way he just jumped right into the demoing his app for us without giving us any background. So many talks start off slow before getting to the good stuff. He started with it by demoing what Archaeopteryx could do. The title was kind of misleading though, because the talk was really about doing stuff you love, because you love it. Which is why we have this app now.

Of course Friday night was the Hashrocket after-event party. In the RV. In the parking lot at the Marriott. Thanks for doing this guys. The party was definitely worth being exhausted the next day. Best part? The hand-made beer pong table Yes, it actually made it through a game of beer pong.

In other big news, Jeremy McAnally is planning next year’s Ruby Hoedown in Nashville. The plan now is to make the conference free to attenders. Hopefully I’ll see you there!