Red Dirt Ruby Conf and Using Core Data with MacRuby

I just got back from Red Dirt Ruby Conf in Norman, OK. The accommodations were terrific — The Embassy Suites in Norman looks new, and they served us free omelets-to-order every morning. The food was good, the Wi-Fi was blazing, and every table in every conference room had power outlets for every chair. The swag table had plenty for all, and I scored a black Stack Overflow T and a Red Dirt Ruby Conf Macbook Pro cover from Sticker Mule that dresses up my work laptop nicely:

I had submitted a proposal to speak at this conference on Core Data and MacRuby that wasn’t selected. Last Sunday, however, one of the presenters had to drop out, so I received an email asking if I’d be willing to speak after all. I quickly accepted, then got to work preparing a presentation. I decided to help ease the transition of Rails developers to desktop development using Core Data and MacRuby by drawing parallels between Rails/ActiveRecord and Core Data. I had seen the frustration of a coworker who was well-versed in Rails, trying to work with Core Data. The parallels I drew were:

• database.yml = persistent store coordinator
• migrations = managed object model
• ActiveRecord = managed object context

The presentation (Keynote format) and sample project are available on github at http://github.com/hoop33/CoreDataWithMacRuby.

At Red Dirt, I also snagged some new stickers for my personal laptop, which looks more like a college student’s steamer trunk every day:

I renewed some friendships, met some new folks, learned about CoffeeScript and JRuby and Rubinius and DataMapper and Fat Models and OmniAuth — lots of things to follow up on. I love the single-track format, which I guess appeases loss avoidance, and the day-of-speakers plus day-of-training format worked well. Looking forward to Red Dirt Ruby Conf the Third!