Enjoy RuPy – Do enjoy the polish beer!
Thursday, January 14th, 2010You don’t like to read? Watch the talk.
It was no less than Michał Łomnicki, one of the main Cells supporters, who made me aware of the upcoming Ruby/Python conference RuPy 2009 in Poland.
Being a conference parasite I kindly delegated responsibility for proposals to my polish friend.
And, suddenly, we were approved participants with the right to speak!
We were thoroughly discussing our talk outline in the following weeks, mainly the issues where and when to drink which type of beer.
Thursday - „slide preparation“
My flight to Wrocłav left on thursday, november 6th and when Michał picked me up from the airport we finally opened the first beer can in his flat about an hour later.
After learning my first polish word „Zdrówko!“(which is a short form of „Nazdrowie!“) we left the apartment heading to the bar „Przekręt“ together with his lovely girl Patra.
Michał, Nick, Patra.
After several drinks with lots of friends we postponed the slide preparation to friday in favor of giving different polish vodkas a literal shot.
Friday - „slide preparation“
Man I didn’t know anything about the disastrous impact of polish vodka. Yes, I was sick on friday. Really sick. For a whole day. Not to talk about the final visit of Michał’s bathroom. Zdrówko.
Do I look sick?
In the evening we drove to Poznań where the actual conference should happen. The Frolic Goats Hostel was our host and all of us, Patra, Gosia, Michał and me went to bed quite early (after some beers, naturally).
Saturday – show time!
After we finished our slides in the breakfast room of the hostel both of us felt really better. I was happy about being sober, well rested and prepared for the talk. Not kidding.
Poznan's famous toilet bar.
Some talks were already canceled, including the talk prior to our talk and the talk next to us. That was saddish for the other speakers.
However, we had time to setup our equipment and by the time we began, our room was completely crowded as we were the only option.
The talk
I was impressed by Michał’s enthusiasm while presenting Cells to the 150 nerds audience. He started by showing the need for clean, small MVC stacks in Rails as Cells provides, made descriptive examples for usage and writing your own cells and finally demonstrated a project of his employer Starware which uses Cells everywhere.
Showtime!
Having about 30 mins left I did my presentation about Apotomo and how it brings stateful components to Rails.
We were talking to a mainly non-rails audience and kept our talk very high-level, sparing the details of API internals and concentrating on abstract components studies.
My metaphor was a dashboard application with a drinking Michał widget. Whenever I switched back to the example – giggling in the whole room.Sorry Michał for making fun of you for almost 30 mins, haha.
It was fun. The interested audience made me feel good. There were lots of smart questions including the Apotomo session handling, caching, events and observers and more. Afterwards I had interesting discussions with participants, which proofed again: People do like components.
G33k Party, Sunday and our way home
We had dinner with Marek and Pawel from Starware and instantly began drinking. The conf party was in a nice bar and was stuffed with nerds from the conference. Everybody was drinking, discussing, and drinking, again.
After some hours we moved to a very cool location called Kultowa. That’s a maze of bar/etablishment/restaurant where we felt very comfortable and enjoyed the punk and rock music till late night.
The polish guy.
Sunday, almost afternoon, we went back to the conf.
Curiously enough, many talks were canceled again due to fulminating headaches or sickness. Some funny guy noted that the reason for this could be the „strongly dynamic nature“ of the conference.
To be honest, we just went to Charles Nutter’s JRuby talk which was really cool, exposing Charles’ understated sense of humor.
After saying good-bye to the main organizer Jakub Nowak we drove back to Wrocłav and went straight back to our favorite place „Przekręt“, which is named after the movie „Snatch“.
Monday – tiiiiime toooo saaaay gooood byyye
Finally, I almost missed my flight back to Germany as the streets were jammed. Anyway, Michał remained cool and we did it. One minute later and the flight would have left Poland without me.
The poland trip was really awesome and I’d like to thank Patra and Michał for being great hosts, I really had fun all the time, even when I was really sick. Hope to see you guys again!
Pawel- your beer glas is still on heavy duty!
Some notes on our talk
- We luckily decided against live demos and thus used recordmydesktop for screen capturing. Was a good choice as nothing failed.
- I used a very simple example throughout my talk. First I feared it was too simple. In the end, everything was fine and I keep repeating my rule
A conf talk is for entertainment, it is not a lecture and you should not try to teach ‘em!
- The slides I prepared were simple and I added speech balloons to explain things as I got there. People could follow me very good, at least it seemed so.
Stuff you need!
Here’s the video of our talk, thanks to the RuPy guys for providing that!
Michał’s slides are here, and mine are here.
