Thanks to the guys from Confreaks, there’s a whole bunch of video material from conferences for the rest of us to enjoy. I’ve been watching quite a few recently, so here’s some recommendations of talks I found interesting.
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BERT and Ernie: Scaling your Ruby site with Erlang
Talk on the BERT protocol created by Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub.
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Everything on bit shifting, binary protocols and whathaveyou. I’m a big fan of text-based protocols, but it’s nice to get some perspective on the world of binary things as well.
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NoSQL - Death to Relational Databases
The title is to be taken with a grain of salt obviously, but nonetheless, nice introduction to the most important players of the NoSQL world.
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Jim Weirich on applying the SOLID principles to Ruby coding, though it’s more of an introduction to the principles in general with a hint of Ruby.
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The title says it all.
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Nice talk on how Python solves some problems compared to Ruby.
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Cooking with Chef - Your Servers will thank you
Great introduction to the essence of Chef and how easy it is to write your own cookbooks and recipes. I agree with lots of the things James talks about here, and the their way of using Chef comes pretty close to how we’re using it on Scalarium.
The gist of all of them for me: They’re a lot less about Ruby or even Rails. Personally I’m pretty bored of hearing yet another talk on these topics, or stuff like Cucumber. Talks that expand my horizon beyond what people do with Rails have become a lot more interesting to me.