After I gave my talk at RubyKaigi, people told me that it went well. While I believed them, I really wanted to see how it went for myself. Fortunately, the talks were recorded, and have since been posted to Youtube. I’m reasonably happy with my performance!
My talk’s video has actually been available on YouTube for a little while now, but I held off posting it until our Technology Preview was back in action, which happened last week.
The slides are re-embedded below:
Given that the beginning of a New Year is supposed to be about reflection… and the Playstation Network is down… I’ll share some of my favourite things this year.
Twitter has been excellent to me this year. Lots of entertainment and information. Here’s some accounts that have been my favourites for 2015.
Music:
Probably my favourite song of 2015: Nao’s Zillionaire
Makaya McCraven’s In the Moment was my most listened to Jazz record of the year.
JME’s Integrity was big for me this year, especially Work
Books
I took a bit of a plunge into comics this year, getting a Marvel Unlimited subscription in the last four months of the year. I’ve really enjoyed a good chunk of what I read… and gave up on pretty much anything I didn’t like.
Ms. Marvel (2014): Kamala Khan is great. I wish she had a huge back catalogue I could mainline… but alas, introduced in 2014, I’m up to date, insofar as Marvel Unlimited is concerned.
The reasonably self-contained story of Captain Marvel that ran from 2012-2013 was really well done.
I freaking adore The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.
Movies:
Jupiter Ascending. No. Seriously. Incredibly fun. Just fun. Purely about fun.
That movie about the Force and stuff.
Other:
After RubyKaigi comes tourism, of course.
We were incredibly fortunate that Craig’s wife, Rebecca, planned a full day tour for the first day. This was a fantastic way to get introduced to a broader Tokyo.
Our tour guide, Yosuke Yokokura from Discover Japan Tours, was an excellent guide, and we really enjoyed having him. Our itinerary covered a broad swathe of Tokyo, while being interesting and engaging.
The day started with a visit to the Sensō-ji temple, a Buddhist temple in Asakusa.
Driving across the city, through a number of districts we would revisit later, like Akihabara, Nihonbashi, and Ginza, we then arrived at Shibuya, where we drove through the famous Shibuya Crossing before parking, and heading to lunch. Lunch happened at the fascinating Uobei Sushi, a fascinating sushi place where your dishes are ordered on touch screen and delivered to your table via high-speed ’train'.
Unfortunately I have no photos of the interior, but I'd recommend the link above, which has some videos of the place.
I think for many of us, the stand-out portion of the tour (and for me, perhaps the whole trip!) was our visit to the Meiji Shrine.
We followed up our walk through the Meiji shine area with a stroll through the very interesting neighbourhood of Harajuku.
Sake Barrels
Each year the sake producers of Japan bring straw wrapped barrels of sake to the shine to honor the former Emperor Meiji.
Prayers
Prayers left at the shrine
A chanced wedding
We chanced upon a wedding while visiting. It was a very beautiful ceremony.
We then proceeded to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building to take advantage of its observation decks.
It was a fantastic end to our tour, seeing an overview of the city that we would spend the next could of days exploring.
This year I was honoured and delighted to have my submission to RubyKaigi 2015 accepted. This was the entire impetus for our trip to Japan, and I was incredibly excited to finally be able to start talking about the OMR project in public.
The Besalle-Shiodome, home of the conference.
The conference was excellent. It was my first non-academic conference, and the schedule was filled with great talks. I’ll likely share my favourite videos when they start to show up on YouTube, and as a dual track conference, I’ll have to catch up on some of the ones I missed as well.
As an english speaker, I was very happy that the conference provided English to Japanese translation services. It made it possible to enjoy some of the excellent content from the Japanese conference speakers, for example, @hsbt’s entertaining talk on Ruby’s test suites. I was really impressed with the live translation, so many thanks to the translation team, and to the organizers for hiring them.
View from the speakers podium in Hall A, though, not after my talk, as I totally forgot to take a picture like this after I spoke.
People tell me that my talk went well. It’s hard for me to remember myself, from inside of the speakers-fugue I get into. I’ll have to watch the video when it’s available to confirm. It felt like it went OK, and I was pretty delighted with the questions I got.
I also really enjoyed talking with members of the Ruby community as well. It was nice to start to feel out their needs as a community. Though Kaigi has helped a lot, I am still ultimately an outsider to the Ruby Community, so I really appreciated everyone who helped me to understand their usage of Ruby, and their understanding of the needs of Ruby applications and how OMR might be able to help them.
I didn’t go alone to RubyKaigi. Two colleagues of mine from Ottawa also went, to speak about our experiments with replacing Ruby’s existing garbage collection technology with OMR GC technology. You can see their slides here. I enjoyed sitting in the audience for their talk; It managed to explain everything we were doing, while also getting a couple good laughs from the audience!
Overall, I really enjoyed RubyKaigi. I hope that over the next six months we can make enough progress on OMR to warrant getting talks accepted to RubyKaigi 2016, which will be held in September, in Kyoto. Next time though, I’ll be prepared for picking up a conference-cold, and bring medicine…
Thanks again to the organizers, staff, and helpers for making the conference great. Thanks as well to the sponsors, for making the conference and excellent parties possible.
As is traditional… because I’m doing it now, therefore making it the start of the tradition, I am posting a preview of my trip to Japan, while sitting in Terminal 2 of Narita airport.
Unprocessed, Directly from Camera
More will come once I am home. I am thinking this will end up being a series of posts, as it would likely be too much for one post.
My Kaigi talk’s video hasn’t been posted yet, however, I can share the slides below.
Experiments in Sharing Java VM Technology with CRuby from Matthew Gaudet
I’ll have more thought on Kaigi once I have had more time to digest the trip. In the mean time, please, download our Tech Preview, and let use know what you think of it!
I’ve been holding off on talking too much about it it, but given I’m now listed as a speaker, I guess I can say: I’m going to be speaking about my work on the Ruby JIT at RubyKaigi in Japan in December!
I’ll be writing more here, and in other venues later. Exciting!