Rocky Mountain Ruby Conf 2011

The Foraker Labs team had a great time at this year’s Rocky Mountain Ruby Conference (#rockymtnruby). It was fantastic to see a full house at the Boulder Theatre for the two days of the conference, and we enjoyed hanging out with old friends from within the Boulder Ruby community, as well as getting a chance to meet a whole host of visitors from near and far.

Here’s a brief overview of some of our favorite talks.

How to become a better programmer in 90 days

Foraker Labs just posted this (unofficial) YouTube video of the lightning talk I had a chance to give at the Mountain.rb Ruby conference last week in downtown Boulder, Colorado:

How to Become a Better Programmer in 90 Days

In this brief talk I present highlights from three books on my required reading list that (I believe) will help make you a better programmer:

• The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler

Thanks to Derek Olson for taping and editing, and thanks again to Marty Haught for organizing the conference!

Mountain.rb 2010 recap

I had a great time along with some of the rest of the Foraker crew at Mountain.rb, Boulder’s own Ruby conference.

Check out my recap of Mountain.rb, posted in two parts on the Foraker blog.

Developer Day in Boulder

Yesterday Jake and I enjoyed attending Developer Day at the TechStars facility in downtown Boulder.

Highlights included meeting Chad Fowler, author of one of my new favorite books The Passionate Programmer. It turns out Chad and I are, literally, neighbors. His house in Longmont is just a few blocks away from my own.

Another interesting moment was hearing Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java, express his belief that “Java is likely going to become a legacy language.” Also a bit surprising to me (though I’m sure it’s old news) was his deep love of Python — a language free from the design constraints of backward compatibility that have plagued C++ and Java. Yet another reason that Python’s next on my list of “languages to learn”.