Early last week I had the chance to attend the Symposium on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology organised by UNSW. I wasn’t aware that UNSW was so heavily involved in the community until this event and have since learned about their interest group which has been going on for a while. The talks had a healthy mix of research and industry case studies with subjects ranging from the technical challenges of current blockchain implementations to the legal implications of distributed ledger technology.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you read my summary of Day 1 first. Morning Panel Day 2 started with a morning panel with: Paul Fox from Blockchain.capital Leon Gerard Vandenberg from RightsFusion Pty Ltd & Solara Oliver Harvey from ASIC Ross Buckley from UNSW Law The panelists took turns in giving their views around blockchain, investments and regulation, leading into a Q&A at the end. I was running late to this session and believe I may have missed Ross’ individual slot.

A bit late for a EuroClojure 2014 post but I suppose “better late than never” applies here. The best part of every conference is the networking. Meeting new and interesting people is priceless and I did plenty of that - mostly over Polish beer and food. Polish beer isn’t the greatest but if you must have it, better stick to Żywiec. It’s widely available and was the one which didn’t give me a headache :) - I’ve been told there are amazing microbreweries though I didn’t get a chance to try any while in Krákow.

I hinted at LambdaJam Australia back in my 2012 Highlights post and the dates are fast approaching so I thought appropriate to blog about it once more. YOW! LambdaJam is a conference targeted at intermediate and advanced functional programmers and is organised in talks, jams and workshops. Talks are the traditional format and are 30 minutes long; Workshops aim to introduce a specific subjects to attendees in great detail and are up to two hours long; Jams are hands-on sessions.

I was in São Paulo last week - the 3rd and 4th of November - for RubyConf Brazil. For those who don’t know, RubyConf Brazil is the evolution of Rails Summit Latin America, where I had the privilege to speak in 2009. This year though, all bets were off. Fabio Akita and Locaweb put together a great event, with over 700 attendees and about 30 speakers split in two streams and two awesome days.

{% img /assets/images/rs2009.jpg %} Rails Summit finished a few days ago and I have only one word to describe it: Awesome! I met some really cool people, discussed a whole bunch of technical subjects and managed not to get so nervous in my first presentation ever - I'm not counting internal presentations I've done for my team... My slides and source files can be found here. Feel free to contact me with questions if you got any.

I'll be speaking at this year's Rails Summit Latin America in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It will be a good opportunity to meet some amazing people and visit friends back home! :) Overall I'll be spending 12 days in Brazil, with 2 of them dedicated to the conference. The other 10 I'll be in Rio de Janeiro visiting my family and friends. I strongly advise you to spend some time in Rio too, if at all possible.

As always I expected a good talk from Ola and once more he delivered it. But this one was different. It might have been even boring to some ruby developers since we saw a fair amount of java code in this presentation. Ola gave us a tour through the main classes that make JRuby possible with a single purpose: so we can check out the code and hack ourselves. You can download his slides here.

Tomorrow I'll be once more heading London for this year's QCon. As usual, the schedule looks amazing and I'll try to keep you all posted about what's going on there. Oh and if any of you guys is going and wanna meet up for a geek talk and a couple of beers, just send me a message. Cheers! :)

I'm back in Madrid again after the RailsConf and I think it's time to say something about it. :) First off, the infrastructure provided by the conference was really great. The rooms, WiFi connection, food... Really well organized. Now to the sessions, highlights: Tutorials (Tuesday) - Meta-programming Ruby for fun and profit (Neal Ford, Patrick Farley) The old and good techniques that made Ruby so powerful. Here Neal and Patrick walked us through the main tricks to meta programming like open classes - and conditionally open them - , dynamically define methods, sending messages to objects and how Ruby can help test your Java code in a much easier way.

The title says it already. On monday I'll be going to Berlin to attend this year´s RailsConf. This will be my first one and of course my expectations are pretty high! As usual, after the conference I'll try and give a summary of what happened there, providing as much content as I can. Anyone else's going??? :) C u there!

Behold latin american railers! This year we will have the Rails Summit Latin America on October, 15th and 16th, in São Paulo, Brazil. It's by far the biggest Rails event we've ever had, including many of the speakers that were present at RailsConf. Fábio Akita is also one of the speakers and provides more details on his blog. If you're a assumed rails geek don't miss the opportunity to hear from the big names and to know a beautiful country like Brazil.

As some of you know I went to the European Ruby Conf in Prague, this year. The event was awesome and it's good to know they finally made available the majority of the slides, here. They also published Matz's keynote, and more videos from the conference are being edited right now, so stay tuned to their home page! Enjoy!

Most of last QCon's presentations are available for download here. Highlights to Ola Bini's on JRuby(pdf) and Randy Shoup's on eBay's architectural principles(pdf). And while we're talking about JRuby, it's impressive how it's becoming a recurrent and big subject. Fast. It had its own small space at big event like QCon and in the last Euruko in Prague, we had a presentation by the JRuby Core Developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo.

On friday I'll be heading Prague for the European RubyConf. Anyone is going? :) Almost 300 attendees already registered for the event. And a few very interesting people will be speaking there like Matz and DHH (this one, through skype). Besides that, the organization staff is scheduling 2 parties, friday and saturday, for the attendees. Networking comes to mind, doesn't it? I think it will be a great opportunity to meet interesting and bright people.

Today was the first day of the conference and it started with a tutorial about DSL's with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons. We also had as attendants Ola Bini, core developer of JRuby, and others. My expectations were pretty high and the presentation didn't let me down. I'll try to put here toghether my impressions and some notes I took while I was there. Marting Fowler started discussing what DSL's are and giving some examples that many of us use in our day to day Job.

Next week I'll be at QCon, in London, so if any of you are going to the conference and would like meet up for a couple of beers and a tech talk, please don't hesitate to drop a message. For those of you who have never heard of QCon before, it is a really nice event to play along with some of the most popular names in the software engineering community.