Painting India's Silicon town, Ruby red

23rd March 2010
Painting  India's Silicon town,  Ruby red

The first RubyConf to be held in India, on March 20 and 21 , Bangalore attracted delegates from 29 cities across the globe representing 119 companies, mostly startups. The dual-track event featured 25 speakers, including influential leaders in the international Ruby like Ola Bini (core committer on JRuby since 2006), Obie Fernandez (pioneering Rails developer and author of “The Rails Way”) and Brendan G. Lim (Director of Mobile Solutions at Intridea).

Ruby, the open source, dynamic programming language has seen the emergence of one of the most active open source communities worldwide which has produced support tools and projects like “Ruby on Rails” - a powerful web application development framework that significantly reduces time-to-market and is used by top web companies like Twitter and Shopify.

In his keynote Ola Bini suggested that the proliferation of programming languages was not necessarily a bad thing – he himself got tired of all existing programming languages and decided to create his own, called Ioke. In the future, he foresaw graphic programming languages competing with text based languages – Excel was the archtype graphic language, he suggested
The event included a video call where Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, addressed the Ruby community in India. He also mentioned that work on the long awaited Ruby 2.0 would start in August. Glassfish evangelist Arun Gupta’s presentation on multiple web Ruby frameworks, and ThoughtWorker Sarah Taraporewalla’s talk titled “The Taming of the View” generated a burst of activity on Twitter.

Many delegates skipped lunch on Day 2 for an extended Q&A with Pradeep Elankumaran on “The Big Wave of Indian Startups.”
The conference was principally supported by the Innovation & Technology Trust, a public non-profit body created by Thoughtworks with the objective of providing a support system and networking between professionals in the field of emerging technologies and open-source by bringing them together during workshops, seminars, conferences. Thoughtworks is a global IT consultancy best known for its “Agile” methods for business transformation.

Said Roy Singham, founder of ThoughtWorks, in his opening remarks: “This conference represents a great moment in the history of the software industry in India. We are witnessing the beginning of chapter two - the building of a vibrant indigenous passionate culture of software excellence and innovation. The Ruby community globally represents the best in software. It is therefore a total joy to see India assemble its own high calibre developers - free from the economic dictates of powerful software forces in the west.” He added that India and Brazil were poised to reshape the world of software and trigger a global shift in innovation”. Vishwas Mudugal, CEO of Castle Rock Research India said, “The energy and passion for Ruby and Open Source software in India could be felt at the event. Not only did we get to interact with great Ruby aficionados, programmers and leaders from across the globe, but we also got to learn and share a lot about the current and upcoming trends, tools & innovations in Ruby. I’m sure the next RubyConf will be bigger and better, and I look forward to coming back again next year.”

Videos and presentations from the conference can be accesses at www.rubyconfindia.org  . 

March 23 2010