A touch of deja vu here: UK-based full-time open source developer (http://golightly.games-with-brains.net) on a very restricted budget is booked to speak at RubyConf... Regular readers will recall my similar plaintiff email from last year when along with my friend Elise I was scheduled to cover concurrency.
Thanks to the generosity of a number of ruby-talk stalwarts I made it to the conference and together we showed a packed room how to apply a number of different concurrency models from other languages to Ruby. And as an encore I gave a lightning talk on Go which covered everything from basic syntax to the deepest tricks of type reflection in less than four minutes.
You'd have thought after that the RubyConf crew would have learned their lesson, but it seems not as I'm booked again this year with the imaginatively titled Go<->Ruby (http://www.rubyconf.org/presentations/19). This is a session on Google Go for Rubyists, based on close to two years of study and research. It will be a companion to the session I'm giving remotely at LSRC next month and together I'm hoping that along with the docs provided by google they'll be sufficient for any competent Rubyist to pick up Go and use it in production systems with minimum learning curve.
As my budget currently runs to ramen noodles and bus fares but not much else I'm looking for sponsors to assist with my Travel Fund [0], which this year has a target of £1100. That's a bump on last year as aside from flying over for 4/5 nights I intend to stay at the conference hotel [1].
In the highly unlikely event that the interwebs prove more bountiful than that, the additional funds will go towards the day-to-day costs of working full-time on my open-source projects. These currently include a Ruby-style enumerator library for Go and the festering vapourware of GoLightly, my virtual machine toolkit [2].
Aside from giving one of my trademark incomprehensible, code-heavy extemporisations I'll also be available throughout the conference to answer questions about Go - and if anyone fancies a training session I'd be happy to arrange something for a small consideration.
Ellie
[0] http://pledgie.com/campaigns/15689
[1] I stayed at a motel in Jefferson Parish last year, which was an 'interesting' experience.
[2] Which will one day be the basis for a soft realtime Ruby implementation in Go.
Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://feyeleanor.tel
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However I'll keep an eye out for spare tickets so we can catch up on some of the serious geeking we'll miss in Austin next month.