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Having a good time so far at RubyConf. Desi and I killed some time in the afternoon, then about 40 or more of us had dinner at GordonBiersch including the Rails core team, Matz and Martin Fowler. The actual conference kicked off this morning to the tune of "Harder, better, faster, stronger" by Daft Punk. Seems like there are probably over 200 people here now, more than expected. The ratio of Powerbooks/Other looks to be about 80/20% and my crappy Dell notebook is having a very difficult time hanging onto a wireless signal with so many other computers around.

The first presenter spoke about testing and mock objects (and the ensuing argument about stubs aren't mock objects seemingly went over 90% of the audiences head, maybe even DHH). I think part of the issue is that we don't have a real mock objects library in Ruby -- I'm talking about Jmock-style blackbox mock objects that act simply as message recorders and blow up if the prescribed interaction with them does not happen.

The second presenter is talking about good API design (and trashing Net::HTTP quite a bit in the process). Some good points but I'm having trouble staying interested in the talk because his japanese accent is very strong. I'll be doing some personal followup on the mentioned Huffman Coding principles.