Last weekend I attended RubyCamp in Vancouver. The sessions were high quality and, as a ruby n00b, it was a great opportunity to learn from the community.

I started the morning by attending Alexey’s JRuby overview. It was interesting to get some insight into the problems the JRuby team has faced mapping between Ruby types and Java types. This certainly seems to be better addressed by the .NET DLR which should simplify matters for dynamic language implementations in .NET.

I also spent some time chatting some guys working on Rubinius. They had some pretty strong opinions about ZenTest and AutoTest over Test::Unit and CruiseControl.rb respectively. Of course, they were slightly biased, but it deserves a closer look.

I talked with Marc Mayo about Git, distributed teams and his company Joyent. He ran an insightful session on the trials and tribulations of hosting high traffic Rails applications.

The last two sessions that I attended were one on Merb (an alternative web framework to Rails) and Scott Patten’s Rubyize This!