FutureRuby Day Two: the highlights

Programming life, making noise, surviving robo blimps, and subsidizing the vodka industry

After being warmed up by FailCamp and rooftop partying, the real FutureRuby conference began. Before you start wondering where all the hardcore technical Ruby talks are, keep this in mind:

FutureRuby isn’t a Ruby conference, but a conference for Rubyists.

Here’s organizer Pete Forde starting things off (before someone checks the EXIF data on this photo and catches me in my own lie, I’ll admit that it was actually taken later that day):

I’m not going to describe each talk in detail — the pipes of the Internet are already bursting — clogged? — with coverage already (thanks Enrico, Ron, Jay, Youssef, Barry, Krispy). For reference, here are all the talks.

But a few sessions stood out in particular.

How to program life

On the FutureRuby registration day, Austin Che ran a bio hacking session. The next day, he followed up on this theme with a more theoretical talk about what it takes to “hack biology.”

From Austin’s blurb:

Biology is currently at the tip of a revolution similar to that of electricity and magnetism at the beginning of the 20th century. The electrical engineering revolution has allowed non-physicists to program in high-level languages like Ruby by distilling classical physics into a set of engineering design principles. Similarly, the emerging field of synthetic biology applies engineering principles to biology. Efforts to bring modularity, interchangeable parts, abstraction and standardization to biology is beginning to allow non-biologists to quickly and predictably design and build biological systems. Soon, it may become child’s play to program with DNA.

He started by talking about the unique challenges of biology. For some perspective:

“Imagine Ruby code that not only interpreted itself, but also found silicon, constructed circuits, and made its own computer.”

But that’s not all. Compare and contrast Ruby with DNA:

• Purpose: Ruby was designed to make you feel good. DNA was designed to make you survive.
• DRY: Rubyists know this as “Don’t Repeat Yourself.” However, nature doesn’t have the advantage of starting from scratch each time. Redundancy makes natural systems more robust.
• Object Orietned: Also, one gene can have multiple distinct functions. \
• Coding Style: Let’s just say nature doesn’t really have a style guide. Although Austin has a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices.

Hacking biology requires a new paradigm because:

• Cell growth/death: imagine trying to code when random codes and bits randomly disappear
• Crosstalk: there’s no insulation within a cell
• Mutations: these have significantly more impact than the mostly-mythical memory flips.
• Evolution: Most importantly, evolution works against what we might want to engineer. Almost by definition, modified organisms will be worse off and the cells that are more likely to survive are the ones we don’t want.

And I thought my software development job was challenging. Mind-blowing talk.

Making noise. Ohhhhhmmmmmmm

If you ever find yourself amongst Rubyists and the room erupts into spontaneous “ohhhhmmm“‘s, read on to find out what’s going on.

As Pete explained many, many times, FutureRuby isn’t a conference about Ruby. Instead, it’s:

a congress of the curious characters that drew us to this community in the first place.

For Pete, one of these “curious characters” is Misha Glouberman, a Toronto fixture, the host of the wildly popular Trampoline Hall Lectures, and a professional facilitator.

His contribution to FutureRuby was running a “noise session.” After making sure that cellphones and laptops were put away, two hundred FutureRuby attendees sat in their chairs and simply made sounds (vowels, hand sounds, and hisses, to be precise).

Here’s a game where you were allowed to make sounds only when a floating spatula was in your vicinity:

The result was fascinating. The room — which contained many introverts, many egos, and many characters — seemed to meld into an hour of near-perfect unity.

The crowd-favourite was undoubtedly the moment when Misha got everyone to determine whether to make noises depending on the volume of neighbours. Yes, you’re correct if you suspect that sounds familiar: it’s Conway’s Game of Life played with humans as cells!

Flying robo blimps!

And they weren’t even used to kill anyone! Not only that, the creators, Ron and Damen Evans, coded on it live. Talk about a demo.

The technical name for these gadgets is “BlimpDuino,” a reference to the open source Arduino chip that they’re based around.

The session started off with quietly until a giant silver blimp burst from behind a wall to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries (kudos to Phill for nailing the timing on the music). Ron and Evan remote-controlled the blimp to interact with some people in the crowd.

Pravda

After a few more iPhone sessions in the afternoon, Saturday’s talks came to a close. However, that was only half the day, perhaps the less memorable half.

Where does a Soviet-themed conference host its flagship party? At a vodka bar. Duh.

Thrown in was a FutureRuby ice sculpture. Sadly, it didn’t live to see another day.

Remember Krispy’s crazy goggles from the night before? He went even further for the party at Pravda:

It is certainly quite an experience to walk the Spadina corridor dressed as a World War 2 russian general sporting a KGB medal. The cabbie kept glancing at me in his rearview not quite sure about who I was or what I was doing. The best was when I got out near the bar and walked the last few blocks and a drunk guy comes stumbling out of an ally and says “What are you - fucking KGB?” I simply stopped and turned my head toward him to which he shrunk his shoulders and slunk back into the ally from which he came.

Krispy was one of the many people captured in the photobooth. The results are on Flickr (including a shot of these two revolutionaries.)

Not everyone went with the Soviet theme. Here’s Matt Knox doing his own thing:

Needless to say, much food and vodka was consumed. In fact, so much so that the tab ran short. Thanks Tobi / Shopify for the last-minute infusion of cash which kept everyone going until the end of the night.

Saturday’s slideshow

FutureRuby, Day 1: biology hacking and rooftop partying

There ain't no party like an Unspace party

This beautiful vista was the backdrop for most of my Friday night. It’s the view from the Unspace roof. What was I doing up there?

Simple. It was FutureRuby weekend and organizers Pete Forde and Meghann Millard opened up their office roof up for the kickoff party.

But what’s FutureRuby, you may ask? Well it’s not a Ruby conference.

FutureRuby isn’t a Ruby conference, but a conference for Rubyists. This is a call to order - a congress of the curious characters that drew us to this community in the first place. We have a singular opportunity to express a long-term vision, a future where Ruby drives creativity and prosperity without being dampened by partisan politics.

(And for the non-geeks, Ruby is a programming language.)

Whereas RubyFringe was all about the punk aesthetic, FutureRuby went for a Soviet theme. The posters were stunning. Some attendees also got into it, some a bit more than others.

But first, some biology hacking

As part of Future Ruby’s mandate to be a “congress of the curious,” Pete invited Austin Che to give a talk about hacking biology (but more on the talk in a later post). To warm up the audience, he ran a hacking session during conference registration.

From the official description:

After this 20-minute hands-on workshop you’ll be able to give it a cute name, let it incubate overnight - and viola! You too have a new petri-imprisoned pet for the duration of FutureRuby.

Apparently some of them did indeed end up smelling like bananas. Others glowed.

Setting up

But as people who went to RubyFringe last year know, this experience is almost as much about the parties as the talks. Friday night was the first of three open-bar, catered parties.

A few fellow-volunteers and I arrived early to help set up. Unspace’s office is above the Lululemon store on Queen West and they have two levels of decks.

Christopher Walken isn’t particularly Soviet but he certainly lived at approximately the right time.

But it wasn’t all hard work. Here are Ryan McMinn and Greg Borenstein:

The Unspace office is furnished with all sorts of wonderful distractions. RubyFringe attendees from last year are all memorialized on the wall:

Here’s Phill looking worried because he just thought he broke the pinball machine. (Wups, did I just break our secrecy pact? Well the machine is fine now so I figure it’s cool to mention):

Partying on Unspace’s roof

The guests (and booze) started flowing in.

And here’s Pete with one of his legendary film Leica M8 cameras:

Last year, Giles Bowkett attended Future Ruby and gave what many consider to be the best presentation of the conference. He demo’d Archaeopteryx, a ruby MIDI generator. Sadly, Giles couldn’t make it again this year but his project was able to make the journey to Toronto in the form of a robotic drum set created by Greg Borenstein. Here it is set up in Pete Forde’s office.

(By the way, if you think his office is gorgeous, so do the good folks at Unplggd)

Here’s a video of it in action. Apparently it’s also a relaxing place for Ruby heroes to catch up on emails.

All in all, a fantastic way to start off the weekend.

Stay tuned. Two more posts in the pipes for Saturday and Sunday’s proceedings. For FailCamp coverage (another FutureRuby-affiliated event), see my previous post.

The full slideshow

As usual, there’s a slideshow:

Sailing to FailCamp

FutureRuby is possibly the best weekend of the year for Ruby nerds like myself. The night before was FAILcamp.

FAILcamp is an open event for folks to share their stories and lessons taken away from failure. It’s also a valid excuse to hit the docks and overrun the swanky QCYC yacht club with hedonic nerdery.

Yacht club eh? How cool would it be to actually arrive on private vessel?

In the yellow is my friend Tim’s sailboat, “No Frills” — the name is a nod to both the colour of the boat and inclination of the skipper. He kindly invited us on board.

Because I seem to particularly prone to to damaging my electronics, I did a full hard drive backup the night before. Fortunately, we arrived without incident.

And I even got to help raise the sails.

Tales of Failure

Safely back on solid ground, we were greeted with badges that asked for our names and what we fail at. I filled in “I fail at saying no.” This proved to be a liability when Trina noticed and asked me to buy her a drink.

Here’s Trina putting Phill through the same routine.

Joey warmed up the crowd with some quick icons of FAIL: keyboard cats, a survey of president of Mexico, and his favourite movie, Deliverance — “a canoe trip that failed.”

He turned over the floor to people to tell their tales of failure.

First up, an awkward — but certainly passionate — case for living an “unencumbered lifestyle” with “zero baggage.” Joey cut in and asked if she had any stories about failure and she yielded the stage.

Next up, a story of three fails and a win. A developer from Toronto described his courtship fails: driving on the wrong side of the road on a first date, taking the dog-loving girl to a movie that involved animal cruelty, and remaining in his boxers at the girl’s parents house. The win: a 10 month son and 8 years of being together.

After a few more first-date stories, Pete Forde came up.

Joey’s intro’d him with the following analogy: “If DHH is the father of Rails, then Pete is it’s Bad Touch Uncle.”

Pete had his own anecdote about romantic attempts.

“I once took a date to Downfall. I challenge anyone to make out after seeing that movie.”

But he sidestepped that theme by shifting gears into the second theme of the night: border crossing tales — FailCamp went into “anal sovereignty territory,” as Joey put it.

I won’t ruin Pete’s story by trying to retell it but the punchline sounded something like this:

“If dude wants to stare in your ass, it’s likely shittier for them.”

(Pete, I think you’d agree that the story was more about the journey than the punchline)

The prize for shortest and sweetest went to Sarah Lindsay. “Pete sent me an invitation for FailCamp last year but I declined it because I thought it was some sort of camping trip.” Communication fail.

Sailing home

But alas, the seas called again. (Y’arrr.) In short, sailing is the most relaxing thing I’ve done in years.

Also, nothing’s more beautiful than seeing Toronto at night from the lake.

And the slideshow