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What Really Happened at #inspect 2013

What Really Happened at #inspect 2013

For those who couldn't make it to Brussels, here's what you missed.

Dispassionate objectivity

From my experience, great conferences have one thing in common -- debates during, in-between and after talks. #inspect 2013 was no different.

Most speakers had opinions on snake_case vs camelCase. I overheard arguments both for and against Teacup at lunch. Colleagues from around the globe weighed in on the benefits of wrappers and the pitfalls of additional dependencies. Even the venue for #inspect 2014 sparked a catch phrase -- "Tan or tech, Cancun or New York".

However, every debate I heard was tempered, genial and good-natured. A success considering that the vast majority of attendees come from either a Ruby or an Objective-C background. It was a welcomed sanctuary from the frequent drama of the Rails community. I suppose being face-to-face with people who think differently than you makes it harder to dismiss them or their ideas.

Looking back, I learned that I prefer using snake_case so I can quickly tell what are RubyMotion DSLs and what are Cocoa Touch APIs. I'm excited to try out Teacup and to learn when it makes sense. I discovered that I'll happily include wrappers that increase the intent and readability of my codebase while simultaneous reducing the amount of code that I have to produce and maintain. And next year, I'd rather sweat, than freeze, my balls off thank you very much. Your mileage may vary.

Coming together is a beginning

Organizing a conference is not for the faint of heart. Lucky for us, Laurent Sansonetti is all heart.

However, Laurent is only 1 man. And while the Hipbyte team has made tremendous progress during it's first year -- on both the RubyMotion compiler and the toolchain -- the company is still a bootstrapped start-up.

As a community, we have work to do.

First and foremost, there are standing help requests from developers of the following open source projects:

And if these projects don't tickle your fancy, there's plenty of room to carve out a niche of your own. The most pioneering ideas I overheard were of DSLs to test the accessibility of apps for the blind and of wrappers for verbose, low-level frameworks like CoreBluetooth. I can't wait to hear yours.

Prediction

Conferences inspire and motivate us. They're magical moments in time and space where we can ignore the present and dream the future.

In my mind, the end of #inspect 2013 is the beginning of the RubyMotion community. It's a pleasure to count myself among a community enthusiastic, caring people and to think of where my adventure with RubyMotion might lead. I wouldn't be surprised to see double or triple the attendance at #inspect 2014.

To my new friends, I wish you the best of luck on your RubyMotion adventure. And for those of you on the sidelines, there's never been a better time to buy a chip in the game.

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