CASCON 2006 presentation material

Cascon 2006 is officially over: what an amazing experience! My bulldog-like physical appearance may make you think that I’m talking about the excellent food that was provided free of charge, but I’m not. 😉

The conference was remarkable in every aspect and I’m now all the more proud of working for such a great company (IBM that is, not the Hilton Hotel :-P).

Day 2:

In the afternoon, I taught the first Ruby on Rails and DB2 hands on workshop to a class of over 30 people. I started with a long introduction to Ruby, followed by a brief Rails overview by my colleague Alex. We had a small break, and then I started explaining Rails while creating a basic step by step application using DB2 as database. The feedback was very good with many enthusiastic people, but there was a lot of material to be covered in a really short time – so some participants felt more time should have been spent on the hands-on part.

Day 3:

We tried to incorporate the feedback from the first class into the second one
(this was a repeat of yesterday’s class for more than 30 new people). We decided to trim down the amount of material shown during the Ruby and Rails introductions and dedicate much more time to the hands-on session. We wanted to make it as good as it gets, considering the broad scope and the small amount of available time.

The feedback was overwhelming with a lot of praise left on the evaluation forms. One of the participants congratulated me, telling me that he was impressed by the fact that we covered 2 days worth of material in the short span of 3 hours. It was a very fast paced experience, but certainly a great one.

Day 4:

Time to sit back and relax. I followed the third part of the workshop about Social Computing / Web 2.0, which included a lively debate about the future of the Web and its current revolution. Nothing new of course, but still a very interesting discussion.

You can download my Ruby slides and a basic step by step pdf to get started with DB2 and Rails.

You can also get Alex’s Rails overview here.