As Ruby on Rails grows, matures, and gains mainstream acceptances, so proliferate the conferences. RailsConf US, RailsConf Europe, and RubyConf. EuRoKo, RubyKaigi, Scotland, Latin America, Canada, Nederlands. Rails Edge. Half a dozen regional conferences. The Ruby conference’s bad-influence punk cousin, RubyFringe. And now Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference, the worst-named conference since NeoCon® Xpress L.A. But Obie Fernandez, the conference chair, has already addressed the name issue (“Voices that matter? SRSLY? Does that mean people not speaking at the conference don’t matter?”), so there isn’t much more to say about that.

Luke, Eric, and I will be attending the conference next month (November 17-20), thanks to generous complementary passes. We’re suckers for free conferences and are looking forward to it. They’ve also offered a $200 discount to our readers, so if you decide to attend, use this discount code and save: PR2MAL4.

Here is my take on the conference.

1. Boston: great city. Should be fun.

2. Obie was inspired by RubyFringe. Single track, 30 minute talks, 150 attendees (?).

3. The agenda looks pretty professional and, well, straight. For better or for worse. Four case studies, several few enterprise-focused talks, and every base covered: scaling, refactoring, testing, plugins, deployment, etc. Fortunately, Giles Bowkett will also be there with a talk entitled “Beyond the Mountains of Madness with Ruby.” As with any conference, expect some flops and some good talks, and hope for some great talks.

4. The speaker list looks pretty good, including two of our very own Twin Cities folks: Matt Bauer and Tom Enebo.

5. Timing: why is this held two weeks after RubyConf? I’ll be at both, and missing work for two conferences in a month isn’t quite ideal.

6. Some sort of vocal performance seems to be involved. (Obie, is that you?)

If you’re interested in going, you can get $200 off the entry price by using this discount code: PR2MAL4.

Here are the slides from my RailsConf Europe talk on MapReduce and EC2. Not sure how much sense they make without the narration, but at least you can appreciate my fantastic drawing skills!

This September, I’ll be presenting at RailsConf Europe on EC2, MapReduce, and Distributed Processing. The talk will explain the MapReduce approach to distributed processing, will show a few example implementations, and will discuss MapReduce vs. other distributed processing techniques.

Whether you’ll be there or not, if you’re interested in learning more about MapReduce, here are some resources. I’ll write a few more posts on the subject before the conference, so watch this space as well.

Cluster Computing and MapReduce is a great series of video lectures given to Google interns in 2007. The first two are the most appropriate: the first introduces distributed processing concept, while the second covers MapReduce itself.

MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters is the paper by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat of Google that got things going in the first place.

MapReduce for Ruby: Ridiculously Easy Distributed Programming discusses MapReduce and introduces Starfish, a Ruby library for distributed processing. Starfish is not a MapReduce implementation, however – it takes a somewhat different approach to distributed processing.

Skynet (a few writeups: InfoQ, Dion Almaer) is another Ruby-based distributed processing system inspired by MapReduce.

Writing Ruby Map-Reduce programs for Hadoop discusses using Ruby to wrap Hadoop, a MapReduce-like system built in Java.

Introduction to Parallel Programming and MapReduce at Google Code University, a good overview of distributed processing and the MapReduce approach.

And finally, one article that you should avoid:

MapReduce: A major step backwards compares MapReduce to relational databases, and says that MapReduces loses out because it doesn’t support database indices, database views, Crystal reports, etc. Basically, the complaint is that MapReduce isn’t SQL compliant. WTF? Clearly, the author(s) didn’t understand what MapReduce is. The problem, as explained elsewhere, is that the authors thought that MapReduce == CouchDB/SimpleDB. Which is obviously not true. %s/MapReduce/SimpleDB the original article and it makes some sense. But long story short, this article will teach you nothing about MapReduce, and will likely confuse you further. So stay away.

I gave this Lightning Talk on the last day of RailsConf.

So it probably goes without saying that Google is the search engine of choice for technically-inclined folks. But I was still a little surprised to see how skewed it is. Here is a recent chart of search traffic to RailSpikes. That’s 97.7% Google, 2.3% world.

A few other tibits.

Browsers

Operating System

You

What’s the breakdown of traffic to your blog/site?

We’ve been getting complaints about seeing duplicate posts in some feedreaders (and I’ve seen this myself several times at Planet Ruby on Rails). We like our subscribers and don’t want to piss you off!

Does anyone know what causes this? We are using FeedBurner with Mephisto (approximately version 0.8) and producing Atom. The feed validates.

Our guess is that it has something to do with updating the posts, but we’re not sure. It may also happen when updating the permalink (which I encourage my co-authors not to do after publishing. Naughty naughty!) On Planet Ruby on Rails, there is sometimes a problem where one copy of the post goes to “www.railspikes.com” and one to “railspikes.com” and one to the FeedBurner post link (example).

We have id, published, updated and link tags to identify each entry:

1
2
3
4
5

<id>tag:railspikes.com,2008-04-25:1351</id>
<published>2008-04-25T18:57:00Z</published>
<updated>2008-04-25T18:57:12Z</updated>
<link href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RailSpikes/~3/277795704/startup-school-2008-misc" rel="alternate" type="text/html" />

Any ideas? We’d like to fix this problem.

Slantwise Design is hiring one Ruby on Rails Dark Lord of the Sith. Candidate will lead Rails projects in a fast-paced, show-no-mercy environment. Our ideal applicant will have 1-3 years of Rails experience, a strong programming background, and be open to the power of the dark side.

• Ruby on Rails
• Ruby programming (non-Rails)
• Web deployment experience (Linux/Unix, mongrel, etc.)
• Java background a plus (and JRuby experience great), but not necessary
• The force, esp. mind trick
• Database knowledge (i.e. deeper than just ActiveRecord)

You will also be responsible for enforcing order within our projects. We practice rigorous waterfall project management, with heavy emphasis on meetings and documentation, so experience with the FAHS system (Fear -> Anger -> Hate -> Suffering) a plus.

We currently have two Rails Sith Lords on staff but are interested in bringing in some fresh talent. To apply, please send your resume to darklord@slantwisedesign.com and vanquish one of our current developers in single combat.

Edit: Happy April 1

Sadly, we aren’t actually hiring Rails developers at the moment, but special thanks to Darth Rubious, who put Eric in the hospital.

Hopefully you’ll see more regular posts from us in the future.

We’ve moved Rail Spikes to a new server all by itself because the performance was terrible. Posting was very frustrating because saving posts would take forever and often fail with proxy timeout errors. Now, things are a lot more snappy.

I’ve also upgraded the site to Mephisto 0.8 which has a few new features. There may still be some kinks to work out, so let me know if you see any problems with the site!

RailSpikes has had the same design for about a year, and we’re about ready for something new. So we’re putting the finishing touches on the following redesign:

RailSpikes Redesign

Any thoughts or concerns?

For those who care about this sort of thing, I fixed the problem with this site’s Atom feed where summaries were being included twice.

You can subscribe to the feed here.