Will I still be a Rubyist in 5 years? #rdrc

(blogarhythm ~ Ruby - Kaiser Chiefs)
The third RedDotRubyConf is over, and I think it just keeps getting better! Met lots of great people, and saw so many of my Ruby heroes speak on stage. Only thing that could make it even better next year would be to get the video recording thing happening!

I had the humbling opportunity to share the stage and here are my slides. Turned out to be a reflection on whether I'd still be a Rubyist in another 5 years, and what are the external trends that might change that. Short story: Yes! Of course. I'll always think like a Rubyist even though things will probably get more polyglot. The arena of web development is perhaps the most unpredictable though.

A couple of areas I highlight that really need a bit more love include:

• There's a push on SciRuby. Analytics are no longer the esoteric domain of bioinformaticists. Coupled with Big Data (which Ruby is pretty good at), analytics are driving much of the significant innovation in things we build.
• Krypt - an effort lead by Martin Boßlet to improve the cryptographic support in Ruby. My experience building megar made it painfully obvious why we need to fix this.

Let it never be said, the romance is dead
'Cos there’s so little else occupying my head

I mentioned a few of my projects in passing. Here are the links for convenience:

• RGovData is a ruby library for really simple access to government data. It aims to make consuming government data sets a "one liner", letting you focus on what you are trying to achieve with the data, and happily ignore all the messy underlying details of transport protocols, authentication and so on.
• sps_bill_scanner is a ruby gem for converting SP Services PDF invoices into data that can be analysed with R. Only useful if you are an SP Services subscriber in Singapore, but other wise perhaps an interesting example of extracting postitional text from PDF and doing some R.
• megar ("megaargh!" in pirate-speak) is a Ruby wrapper and command-line (CLI) client for the mega.co.nz API. My example of how you *can* do funky crypto in Ruby ... it's just much harder than it should be!