speaker.md

Mark Menard

Contact details

• Twitter: @mark_menard
• Website or Blog: http://www.enablelabs.com/
• Company: Enable Labs http://www.enablelabs.com/

Speaker bio

Mark Menard is the founder of Enable Labs, a boutique consulting firm, in Troy, NY, specializing in product development, business productivity and problem solving. Mark has spoken at Ruby conferences such as LA Ruby Conf, Ruby on Ales, and Wicked Good Ruby. Mark also evangelizes Ruby at such events as BarCamps and CodeCamps. Mark has also spoken on Software Patents at TEDxAlbany, and several academic settings. Mark frequently presents on Ruby issues at the TechValley Ruby Brigade; and does training sessions covering Ruby, Rails, refactoring, test/behavior driven development, and other software development topics.

Mark used to be a Java developer and caught the dynamic language bug when he started coding in Groovy and then discovered Ruby. Since then he has added iOS development using Objective-C, Ruby's twin separated at birth.

talk.md

JRuby: Insights from Six Years in Production

• Desired talk duration: 45 minutes

Abstract

JRuby is the primary alternative implementation of Ruby available. With support for native threads, excellent garbage collection, and the introduction of Invoke Dynamic it has grown into a formidable platform. So, what can JRuby do for you? Learn how JRuby differs from MRI, how JRuby supports parallelism, how to use Java libraries from JRuby, how to use Ruby from Java and more. Java no longer means just the language anymore, the JVM is an excellent place to host Ruby applications.

Notes

I presented this talk at Wicked Good Ruby 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_JJD-AEtNM&list=PLnxOotqZQyl49hjkNB480d6vln5VJtUyU). I would update the talk and cover more materials dealing with Java/JRuby integration, and JRuby gotchas. This talk was well received and given the feedback and another half year of JRuby it would be ever better.